Salt-Rated Concrete Garage Floors in Thunder Bay, ON

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Two to four days of on-site work for most garage floors. If we are breaking out an old slab inside a standing garage, add time at the front for removal and for getting the debris out through one door. The cure is what determines when you get your garage back, not the pour. Keep vehicles off for at least seven days. Plan on being without the space for longer than the work takes.

It depends most on whether the garage is already standing. An open build the truck can reach is the cheapest version. Breaking out a failed floor inside a finished garage and moving new concrete in through a single door is a substantially bigger job. Beyond that, size, thickness, reinforcement, how much subgrade has to move to set the fall, and whether a drain is going in all matter. We quote after seeing it, and the estimate names the mix.

The general standard for a residential garage slab is 100 mm with a thickened perimeter, though what you park on it changes the answer. A slab that takes a truck, a hoist, or heavy equipment needs more than one that takes two cars. Thickness is also not the whole story: the base under the slab and the mix in it do more for longevity than an extra inch of concrete over poor preparation.

Almost always salt. Your vehicle carries road salt in on its underside all winter, drips it onto the slab, and it sits there in the same spots. Salt water works into the surface, freezes, expands, and takes small pieces of the surface with it, which is called scaling. It concentrates where the car parks and where meltwater collects. It is worse on a floor poured without the proper air entrainment, because those microscopic air voids are what give freezing water somewhere to go.

The Ontario Building Code requires an attached or built-in garage floor to be sloped so liquids drain out to the exterior doors. Interestingly, the code specifies no slope figure at all, so any number you are quoted is that contractor's own standard rather than a code requirement. A floor drain is possible in some situations and adds cost and complexity, and it is not a substitute for building fall into the slab.

It is a bigger job than an open pour and it is worth being clear about what it involves. The old slab has to be broken out and carried out through the door, the subgrade has to be re-cut inside a confined space, and the new concrete has to be moved in rather than poured directly off the truck. It is doable and we would rather set the expectation properly at the quote than have you find out on day two.

Reinforcement is not required by code in residential slabs, and it does not prevent cracking. What it does is hold cracks tightly closed so the two sides stay locked together and the slab keeps behaving as one piece rather than two. On a garage floor carrying vehicle loads, that is worth having, and we will tell you what we are proposing and why.

This deserves a real answer rather than a preference. Concrete Ontario's published position is that air-entrained concrete should never be steel trowelled, because troweling drives the entrained air out of the top layer and that layer can later separate from the slab. A garage floor has to be air-entrained under the code. A flat, dense, easy-to-sweep floor is achievable with magnesium and aluminum floats without going to a steel trowel. We will show you what we recommend and explain the tradeoff rather than just doing what looks best on day one.

Three habits do most of the work. No de-icer on the floor at all the first winter, sand if you need traction. Rinse the floor down in spring once the weather allows, before the winter's salt sits through another year. And keep the fall clear so meltwater actually leaves rather than pooling. A sealer can help with staining and is worth discussing once the slab has had at least a month to air dry.