How to spot an epoxy quote that’s cutting corners

Julio Lozano started Supreme Epoxy Boyz after a contractor quoted his own garage floor and he figured out he was being scammed. This is the checklist he wishes he’d had in his hand that day.

Where this started

Two years ago Julio wanted his garage floor done. He got a quote, looked hard at what was on it, and realized he was being scammed. So he did the thing most people don’t have time for. He went and learned how floors actually get coated, from the grinding to the last top coat, and started doing it right for people in Palmdale and the rest of the Antelope Valley.

That’s still the whole pitch. We’re a crew of three. We tell you what goes into your floor and what could go wrong with your slab, and we’ll tell you what we would not do even if you asked. If another company’s quote beats ours and it’s honest, take it. The point of this post is to help you see the difference before money changes hands.

Julio still runs the jobs himself. He’s the one who looks at your floor, he’s on the grinder, and he’s the one you call if something’s off. That matters when you’re comparing quotes, because the person writing a quote and the person doing the work aren’t always the same, and details get lost between them.

The prep line tells you almost everything

Epoxy grabs clean, open concrete. It does a bad job holding onto a smooth, dusty, sealed or oily slab, and most garage slabs out here are some mix of those. So the most important line on any quote is the one that says how the concrete gets ready.

An honest quote says the slab gets ground with a diamond grinder, and that the dust gets vacuumed up. If the prep line only says clean and etch, or just surface prep with no detail, ask what that means in plain words. Acid etching is faster and cheaper, and it’s the corner that gets cut most. You can see how we do it on our concrete grinding page.

Look for crack repair next. Almost every slab has cracks. A quote that never mentions them is either assuming they’ll vanish under the coating (they won’t) or planning to roll right over them.

Oil is the last prep item. A garage that’s had cars dripping in it for years has oil soaked into the concrete, and grinding alone doesn’t always pull it out. The quote should say how those spots get handled, or at least that somebody looked at them.

Count the coats, then ask what’s in them

A coated floor is a stack of layers. On a flake garage, a quote that’s telling you the truth reads close to this:

• Diamond grind the slab and vacuum the dust
• Fill cracks and chips with a repair material made for coatings
• Base coat, tinted to sit under the flake color
• Full broadcast of flake chips into the wet base, until you can’t see the base anymore
• Scrape off and vacuum the loose chips
• Clear top coat over everything

Thin floors and partial flake

If a quote lists one coat, or two coats with no mention of how much flake, ask how thick the finished floor will be. Thin floors are where peeling and hot tire marks start. A partial broadcast, which is a sprinkle of chips over a painted base, costs less in material and looks like it. It also leaves more of the soft base exposed to tires.

Ask what the top coat is made of too. Under high desert sun that one choice decides whether the floor stays the color you picked or drifts yellow by the second summer. Two quotes can both say three coats and still be very different floors, so ask for product names. A crew that’s proud of what it uses will tell you without blinking.

Same goes for the flake itself. Chips come in different sizes and blends, and the quote should say which. Small chips give a tighter, busier look that hides more dirt. Bigger chips read bolder. Neither is wrong, but you should know what you’re getting before it’s locked into the floor.

Red flags we’d walk away from

None of these alone means you’re getting played. Two or three together and we’d keep shopping.

• A firm price over the phone before anybody has looked at the slab
• No grinding anywhere on the paperwork
• A warranty measured in decades with nothing written down about what it covers
• Hardware store kit epoxy sold as a professional system
• Pressure to sign today because the deal supposedly expires tonight
• No straight answer when you ask what happens if the floor peels

What the warranty line should say

The phone price is the biggest flag on that list. Nobody can price your floor blind, because the slab decides how much grinding, patching and moisture work the job needs. A number given without seeing it is either padded for the worst case or low to get in the door, with the difference showing up later.

Read the warranty before you read the price. Ours is short: flake floors and metallic floors carry a one-year workmanship warranty. If the floor fails because of how we put it down, we come back and make it right. We don’t write a lifetime number on paper, because nobody controls what happens to a floor ten years out, and we’d rather say that than promise something that just sounds good.

How we put our quote together

Julio comes out and looks at the floor, a lot of times the same day you reach out. He checks the slab for cracks, oil, old sealer and signs of moisture, measures the space, and asks how you actually use it. Then you get a price after he’s seen it, with each layer written out so you can hold it up next to anybody else’s.

If your slab has a problem we can’t fix, we’ll say so. If a simpler system would do the job for how you use the room, we’ll say that too. You can read how a full job runs on our garage floor epoxy page, or look at chip colors on the flake epoxy flooring page.