Epoxy Flooring in Gretna, LA

About Gretna

A city on the West Bank and the parish seat of Jefferson Parish. Sits directly across the Mississippi from New Orleans. Has a historic downtown near the river.

Many homes here near the old downtown are older and raised, and many farther out are slab-on-grade with attached garages.

Older concrete near downtown

Many older city homes have no attached garage at all — a carport, a driveway, or a detached garage out back — while many suburban homes have an attached one- or two-car garage. Where there is a garage behind an older house, it is often small, sometimes with a slab that has been patched, painted, or both over the years. That concrete can be coated well, but expect the quote to spend more on the first two lines than on the finish:

• Removal. Layers of old paint or sealer have to be ground off completely. A new coating bonded to an old one fails when the old one lets go.
• Repair. Spalled edges, settled patches, and wide cracks get rebuilt so the floor is one sound surface. Significant repair commonly adds $200 to $800.
• Sizing. A single-car detached garage often lands near the project minimum of about $400 to $700, or in the single-car range of $1,500 to $3,000, once removal is included.

Suburban garages farther out

Away from downtown, an attached two-car garage on a slab is the usual setup. Here the job is the standard one: moisture reading, diamond grind, crack fill, flake broadcast, and a clear topcoat, for about $2,500 to $5,500 with an epoxy system. If the garage door faces the afternoon sun and stays up, a polyaspartic topcoat keeps the floor from yellowing.

When the garage is really a room

Converted garages and ground-floor rooms are good candidates for a finish that looks deliberate rather than industrial. A solid-color system with a satin topcoat is quiet and easy to keep clean; a metallic epoxy floor is the showpiece option, at about $3,000 to $5,000 for a small room. Either one needs a dry, flat slab first, so leveling patches go on the list before color samples do.

Read the quote line by line

On an older slab, two bids can differ by a lot simply because one includes full removal and the other assumes it can coat over what is there. The four lines below make that visible.

1. 1PrepThe method (diamond grinding or shot blasting), the moisture test, and any moisture-tolerant primer that test calls for.
2. 2RepairCrack and spall repair, removal of an old coating or sealer, and whether that number is fixed or an allowance the crew settles once the floor is opened up.
3. 3Coating systemThe chemistry, the number of coats, and the total mil thickness, not just a product name.
4. 4FinishSolid color, flake, or metallic; the topcoat; and the return-to-service windows for foot traffic and for vehicles.

Front steps and porches

On older houses the concrete people notice first is often the front steps or the porch slab, not the garage. Worn, pitted steps can be resurfaced with a thin overlay and finished with a texture that grips in the rain; sound steps just need cleaning and a penetrating sealer. A glossy coating is the wrong choice on exterior steps — it turns slick the first wet morning.

Permits. Gretna is in Jefferson Parish. Whether a floor coating job needs a permit is a question for your city or parish permit office — for the parish, the Jefferson Parish permit office — and for the installer, who should know before quoting.

Nearby: Harvey and Marrero. Every area by parish is on the service areas page.