Peeling or flaking coating on your garage or shop floor? We take off what's failing and leave a sound slab for the next floor.
Concrete floor stripping and removal in Concord takes an old coating, paint or tile glue off your slab, then cleans and preps the bare concrete so your next floor bonds to something solid.
Most people call us when a garage or shop floor starts peeling, bubbling or lifting under tires, or when they've bought a house with a coating they don't want and need it gone before a new one goes down. The price mostly comes down to how much of the floor has to come up, what's on it, how many coats there are and how hard they're still holding on. The schedule turns on whether anything needs testing first and when your next floor is going in. I'll come out, look at it and give you a written estimate with the reasons behind it, and if the slab needs more work once it's bare, our concrete grinding and surface prep picks up from there.
I come out to look at every job and write the estimate myself, so the person pricing your floor is someone who has ground slabs and knows what's under a coating. When we do the work, I'm on site with our crew, so the plan we talked through is the plan that happens.
We're licensed and insured, so you're not taking on the risk of an uncovered crew working in your garage or shop. On a job that brings a grinder and several people onto your property, that's worth asking any contractor about before they start.
I started this business in Concord in 2023 after summers on flooring and concrete crews, chasing down why some floors held up and others peeled. Most failed floors I've looked at went wrong underneath, so we find out what your slab is doing before anything else.
We respond within one business day, and the estimate is free, done on site and comes with no pressure to book. I'll come look at the floor, check what's on it and how it's holding up, and give you a written estimate with the reasons behind it. It helps if you have the rough size of the floor, what's covering it now and any test results handy.
Whether stripping a floor needs a permit here isn't something I'll guess at, so before we schedule, we check with the city or county office that covers your address, and if the work needs one, we take care of the application and plan the job around it. If you'd like to ask yourself, the city's building permit staff take questions at bldgpermits@cityofconcord.org or 925-671-3107. Testing old tile and glue first matters here too, because the Bay Area Air District's asbestos notice rule covers homeowners as well as contractors, and it applies when a renovation will disturb more than 100 square feet of friable, or crumbly, regulated asbestos material. When we do grind, the state's job-safety rules require a dust reduction system on powered tools grinding concrete, so our grinder comes with dust control hooked up.
We're based in Concord and do this work in the cities around it, from Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill out to Antioch and over to Vallejo, and if your city isn't listed, just ask. Around here we see a lot of garage coatings that were rolled onto a slab nobody prepped, and older houses where vinyl tile and its glue are still sitting on the concrete under carpet or newer flooring.
The cost depends on how much of the floor has to come up, what's on it and how hard it's still stuck, so I price each floor after seeing it. A spot repair is a much smaller job than full removal, several coats or tile and glue take more work than one thin coating, and anything that needs testing adds a step. Your written estimate spells out which of those apply to your floor.
If most of the floor is still bonded and solid, a spot repair usually makes more sense than taking it all up. One supplier's guide draws that line at a floor that's 90% bonded and sound, and says a bond problem across the whole floor is what points to full removal. I check how the coating is holding before we talk about either one.
Diamond grinding is usually the practical way to take a coating off a standard two- or three-car garage, according to one supplier's guide, while shot blasting earns its place on warehouse slabs, loading docks and big commercial floors. Chemical strippers are quiet and make little dust, which suits a building people are still using, but they usually leave the concrete too smooth for a new coating, so plan on acid etching or light grinding afterward. I'll tell you which one fits your floor and why.
It could, since the Air District lists vinyl floor tiles and mastics, the glue under them, among materials that might contain asbestos. When an old floor might hold asbestos or other hazardous material, qualified testing and any cleanup come before grinding or blasting. We treat that test as the first step in planning the job, not a hold-up.
Only if the job comes to $1,000 or less, needs no permit and the person doing it employs no one, under California's minor work exemption. A bigger job, or one with hired help, calls for a license, which is worth checking before anyone brings a grinder in.
One cost guide puts a typical 1,000-square-foot area at one to three days for removal, including cleanup and prep for the next floor. Your timing also depends on whether anything needs testing first, so plan the new floor's install around that window.
