Epoxy flooring FAQs · Nairobi, Kenya

A resin floor starts at KSh 4,000 per square metre, supply and lay, VAT exclusive. That is the entry rate: a solid-colour epoxy on a sound slab, and it covers the diamond grind, the moisture-barrier primer, the 100 % solids base coat and the polyaspartic topcoat.

It is a floor rate, not a ceiling. A thicker system, a slab that has to be rebuilt before anything goes on it, or a room full of coves and falls all sit above it. Which of those apply to your floor is decided at the survey, and the survey is free.

From KSh 4,000/m², supply and lay, VAT exclusive. The figure is settled after the slab is read, not before.

Everything between a bare slab and a floor you can drive on: the diamond grind, crack chasing and repair where the slab is sound enough for it, the moisture-barrier primer, the 100 % solids base coat, the polyaspartic topcoat, and the labour and machinery to lay all of it.

What it does not include is VAT, and it does not include rebuilding a slab that has failed structurally. Where that is needed it is quoted as its own line rather than buried in the rate.

Supply and lay, VAT exclusive. Slab reconstruction is quoted separately and shown separately.

Four things move it, and they are the same four every time. The system: urethane cement is trowelled at roughly four times the thickness of a standard epoxy, and quartz and mortar screeds carry more material again. The slab: spalling, a removed machine base, live cracks or a missing damp-proof membrane are all rebuilt before a coat goes down.

Then the room: coves at the walls, falls to a drain and anti-slip grit are each real work that a flat open bay does not need. And the size: a 40 m² garage and a 400 m² warehouse take the same machines off the same truck, so the small floor carries more of that per square metre than the big one.

System, slab, room, size. Nothing else on the quote is a surprise.

No, for either. The survey takes about ninety minutes across two trips, because three humidity probes go into the slab at 40 % of its depth and stay in for 72 hours. The reading that comes out is yours whether or not you use us.

Free survey, free quote, and you keep the moisture reading either way.

Not usually on the day it is laid, and that is the wrong place to compare them. A tiled floor is a grid of hard pieces held together by grout, and the grout is the part that stains, cracks and harbours whatever is spilled on it. A resin floor has no grout lines because it has no joints.

The comparison that matters is over ten years, with the regrouting, the lifted tiles and the days the room is out of use counted in. That is also why commercial kitchens and food plants are specified in resin and not in tile.

Compare the ten years, not the invoice. The savings on a resin floor are in what you never have to do to it.

The topcoat is the only layer ever renewed, and it is a one-day job over a floor that is abraded and cleaned. On a domestic garage that falls somewhere around year eight to ten; on a warehouse aisle under forklifts it is closer to four.

The base coat and the primer under it stay exactly where they are. The five-year warranty is on adhesion, which is the failure that would be ours: the coating lifting off your slab.

You renew the wear layer once a decade. You do not buy the floor again.

Two to three weeks in a normal month, and longer through the long rains, when every job on the list moves at once. The survey is quicker, usually inside a week of you asking. It is the four days on site that queue, not the visit.

Book the survey early. It costs nothing and it holds your place in the order.

About ninety minutes, most of it on our knees. Three humidity probes go into the slab at 40 % of its depth and stay in for 72 hours, so it is two trips: one to drill and set them, one to read them.

In between we measure the room, check the falls, find the cracks, locate a socket and a tap, and ask what the floor is going to have to survive. That last answer moves the specification more than anything else we write down.

Free, and the reading is yours whether or not you use us.

Out of the room, yes, for all four days. Out of the building, only on Day 02. That is the pour: the one continuous day, the day the resin gives off its smell, and the day nothing can be walked across at any price.

Day 02 is the day to be somewhere else. Cars, pets and children off the slab for all four.

Less than you are imagining and more than none. Every grinding head runs shrouded to a vacuum at the point of cut, which catches the dust at the head instead of chasing it round the room afterwards.

What escapes is fine, it hangs, and it settles in whatever room a door was left open to. This is why Day 01 has a rule about doors and not a suggestion.

Internal doors shut on Day 01, and anything upholstered out of the next room.

The base coat is 100 % solids, so there is no solvent evaporating out of it; what you smell is the resin itself. It is strongest across the eight hours of the pour on Day 02 and largely gone within a day of it. The topcoat on Day 03 is lighter and shorter.

Windows open on Day 02 and Day 03. No extraction plant needed.

The grinder and the vacuum are the loud part, both of them on Day 01, and together they run at about the volume of an angle grinder going continuously. Days 02 to 04 are quiet work.

We are on site at 7:30 and off by 17:30. If you share a wall with somebody, say so at the survey and the noisy hours start later.

On a floor big enough to split, yes. The industrial and quartz systems are laid in phased bays (a strip at a time, cured and handed back before the next one opens), so a workshop, a kitchen or a warehouse aisle can keep working on half its floor.

Under roughly 60 m² there is nothing to phase, and the room closes for the four days.

Phasing adds days and cost. Raise it at the survey, not on the morning.

Rain on the roof, no. Water in the slab, yes. Resin will not bond to a damp substrate and we will not pour onto one; that is the whole reason for the 72-hour probe reading.

Through the long rains, a slab on grade with no membrane under it can sit above the limit for weeks at a time. The honest answer then is a moisture-barrier primer, or a later date.

We would rather move your date than pour onto a reading we do not like.

A bare slab, one 13 A socket, a tap within a hose run, and the internal doors shut. Four things, none of them costs anything, and each one costs a day if it is not done when the truck arrives.

From the moment the topcoat goes down: 24 hours to foot traffic, 48 hours to furniture and racking, 72 hours to vehicles, and seven days to full chemical cure. Those are the real figures rather than the optimistic ones.

Lift racking in, do not slide it. Turn the wheel while rolling, not while stopped.

A floor that is still green is still giving off solvent, and anything rubber-backed laid over it traps that underneath and prints its own pattern into the surface. The mark does not buff out.

It is the single most common way a brand new floor gets damaged, and it is always done by the owner, in week one, trying to protect it.

Nothing rubber-backed on it before day seven.

A soft broom or a dust mop for the daily pass, and a damp mop with a pH-neutral cleaner for the rest. That is genuinely all of it.

No soap film, no wax, no polish. A resin floor arrives with its own gloss already in it, and anything you add sits on top of that and goes cloudy in a season.

Anything citrus or acidic, anything with pine oil in it, steel wool, and wire brushes. Solvent spills are fine from day seven; it is the abrasives and the acids that do the lasting damage, not the chemicals people worry about.

Grit. Most of the wear on a garage floor is sand carried in under a tyre and then ground into the surface by a wheel turning on the spot. Point loads and dragged steel are the other two.

A mat at the door and the habit of turning the wheel while the car is rolling will do more for the finish over ten years than anything you can buy for it.

A doormat is the cheapest maintenance this floor will ever get.

A standard epoxy clear will. Nothing we lay is finished with one; every decorative floor gets a UV-stable polyaspartic topcoat instead, rated under ΔE 2.

Even so, a floor in an atrium under hard south light will shift more over ten years than one in a hallway. If that is your room, we say it at quoting rather than afterwards.

A high-gloss floor is not a slip-resistant surface when it is wet, and we will not specify gloss for a bathroom, a commercial kitchen or a poolside without working fine aggregate into the topcoat.

The grit is chosen by the room and graded (what is right under boots is wrong under bare feet), so it gets decided at the survey, on a sample you have walked on.

The topcoat is the only layer that is ever renewed. On a domestic garage that is somewhere around year eight to ten; on a warehouse aisle under forklifts it is closer to four.

A recoat is a one-day job over a floor that is abraded and cleaned. The body coat underneath stays exactly where it is.

You renew the wear layer. You do not replace the floor.

Five years on adhesion and delamination: the coating lifting off your slab. That is the failure that is ours to own, because it is decided by the survey and the grind, and both of those are our work.

Not covered: wear, impact, chemical attack outside the schedule we specified, and anything that follows work done by somebody else after handover. It is voided by recoating with another product, and by loading the floor before the cure clock says so.

Call the same number you called the first time. A defect under warranty is looked at inside a working week and put right at our cost.

Damage outside it gets a price like any other job, and in most cases it is a cut-out, a patch and a recoat rather than a new floor.

The room usually picks it, not the budget. Decorative epoxy for homes, offices and showrooms; flake for garages and anywhere that has to hide traffic; quartz broadcast for kitchens and wet rooms; urethane cement where there is heat, steam or a washdown hose; an aggregate-filled screed under forklifts.

If two of those could work, the tie is broken by what the floor has to survive rather than what it has to look like.

Sometimes, and rarely well. Tile is a bond breaker: the resin ends up stuck to the glaze rather than to anything structural, and every grout line eventually telegraphs through as a grid.

Where they are genuinely well bonded, we mechanically key them, fill the joints and screed flush first. Where they are hollow anywhere, they come up. We will tell you which at the survey, by sounding them.

A hollow tile under a resin floor is a failure with a date on it.

Not over it. Through it. Everything comes back to sound concrete by diamond grinding, and what is left gets pull-tested before anything new is opened.

This is the whole of the repairs and recoats system, and it is the job most often quoted cheaply by somebody who intends to paint over the problem.

Under cover and in shade, yes. In open Nairobi sun, a slab that swings 20 °C between noon and midnight will move, and a rigid resin laid over it will eventually tell you about it at the edges.

For a terrace or a car park apron we specify a flexible system with an aggregate finish. Or, occasionally, we tell you that resin is the wrong material and a different floor is the right one.

This is what the coving is for. A quartz broadcast or a urethane cement, coved up the wall so there is no joint at the skirting for water to find, and laid to the existing falls so it still drains.

Grit graded for the feet that will be on it: bare in a bathroom, boots in a kitchen. It is the specification that passes a health inspection on the first visit.

Almost never. A static crack is cut out into a V, stitched across with steel, filled with a resin mortar and ground back flush; by the time the primer goes on it is no longer a line in the floor.

A moving crack is a different conversation. That is a structural problem, and laying resin over it only gives the crack a fresh surface to print through. We would rather say that at the survey than at the handover.

A crack that moves is not a flooring job. It is a structural one.

Common in anything built before the 2000s, and the exact reason the probes exist. A moisture-barrier primer holds to 95 % RH and buys most of these slabs a floor.

Above that reading, we say no. A coating laid over vapour that is still pushing up will blister, and it will do it in the second year, not the second week.

A decorative pour is about 2 mm, flake and quartz around 3, an industrial screed 4 to 6, and urethane cement 6 to 9 where it has to take heat and a washdown.

A door that already scrapes will scrape 2 mm more. Measure the gap before we start, and if it is tight we can fall the floor away from the swing or you can plane the door.

Yes, and on a decorative floor we insist on it. Pigment behaves differently under a north-facing window than it does under downlights, and a metallic that looked right on a stand can read completely differently in your hallway.

The sample board is poured on your own slab, in your own room, before a single pail of the real thing is opened.

No decorative floor is poured off a photograph. Not ours, anyway.

Close, not exact, and anyone who promises exact is guessing. Pigment is dosed into resin, resin is poured wet and worked, and the same batch reads differently at 2 mm than it does at 3.

Bring the sample to the survey (a tile, a chip of paint, a door handle) and it gets matched on a board in the room it has to live in.