What we did
This was a big one: a 4-car garage with 950 square feet of floor once we counted the outside edge. The concrete was new, with no cracks and no old coating on it, which is about as clean a starting point as we ever get. With nothing to strip and no cracks to fill, our crew could put the whole day into prep and getting each layer down right.
New concrete still needs prep, though. A fresh slab can have a smooth surface sheen that a coating doesn't grip well, so we cleaned off that sheen and any contaminants, then went over the entire floor with diamond tooling. Diamond grinding the slab opens up the top of the concrete and leaves an even profile, a texture a bit like fine sandpaper, so the base coat can lock in. It's the step that decides how well everything on top holds.
Once the floor was ground, we put down the polyurea base coat, the first layer of our polyurea garage coating system. We broadcast decorative flakes into it to rejection, which means we kept adding flake until the base coat couldn't take any more. After it set, we scraped and vacuumed off the loose flakes and sealed everything under a clear polyaspartic topcoat. We also broadcast aluminum-oxide aggregate, a fine grit, into the topcoat across all 950 square feet for better traction underfoot.
The whole install took one day, and we cleaned up the site before we left. The floor was walkable after about 12 hours and ready for full use, cars included, after about 48 hours. If you've got a newer garage slab with no cracks or old coating, this job is a good picture of what yours could look like: the effort goes into grinding and layering, not into repairs.
