Polished concrete

The floor you already own, finished properly.

Mechanically ground, densified and sealed — a finish that is part of the slab rather than a layer sitting on top of it.

Request a site assessment Call (236) 873-2580

The work

Polishing is grinding, not coating.

Polished concrete is produced by grinding the slab through progressively finer diamond abrasives and hardening it chemically with a densifier along the way. There is no film on the surface, which means there is nothing to peel, blister or delaminate — the most common failure modes of coated floors simply do not apply.

How it looks depends on how much you cut. A light grind leaves a cream finish with almost no aggregate showing. Go deeper and you expose the sand, then the stone. That decision is irreversible, so we cut a test panel on your slab and let you choose from the actual floor rather than from a sample board made somewhere else.

Gloss level is set by where you stop in the abrasive sequence. A satin finish hides scuffing and needs less maintenance; a high gloss looks superb and shows every mark. For retail we usually recommend stopping one step short of maximum gloss.

Finish levels: Cream · Salt-and-pepper · Aggregate
Gloss: Satin to high gloss
Film thickness: None
Refresh: Re-polish, not re-coat

Detail

Not every slab is a candidate.

Polishing exposes what is in the concrete, including things you may not want exposed: old patches in a different colour, cracks, previous coating residue, and variation between pours. We look at the slab before promising a finish, because a polished floor is honest about its substrate in a way a coating is not.

Where the slab is too damaged or too inconsistent to polish well, a decorative coating or an overlay is the better answer, and we will say so rather than sell you a process that will disappoint you.

Questions we get

Straight answers.

Is polished concrete slippery?

Dry, no — a polished floor typically has better traction than sealed or waxed vinyl. Wet is a different matter, and in entrances or anywhere water gets tracked in we either hold the gloss lower or apply a traction treatment to the sealer.

How do we maintain it?

Dust mop and a neutral-pH auto-scrubber. No stripping, no waxing, no re-coating. When the gloss eventually dulls in traffic lanes it is burnished or re-polished rather than recoated, which is why the lifetime cost is low.

Can you polish over an old coating?

The coating has to come off first, which we do mechanically as part of the grinding sequence. That adds cost, and occasionally it reveals that the slab underneath is not a good polishing candidate — which is why we assess before quoting.