Killeen Epoxy Flooring has spent more than twenty years on garage floor coating work, and in Georgetown a quote starts with the address rather than the color chart. The ground under this city is not one material. Which part of it your garage sits on changes what we detail, what we warn you about and what the crack treatment costs.
So we establish what a slab is sitting on before we price it. A garage floor coating is a bonded film a few thousandths of an inch thick that follows the concrete beneath it; it cannot arrest, bridge or absorb what the ground does. That belongs in the conversation at the quote, not in a warranty exclusion discovered later.
What we can commit to is checkable. The proposal names the product, the system build, the finished mil thickness and the surface profile we prepare to, so the floor that goes down can be measured against the floor that was sold. Everything else depends on facts we go out and establish first.
Thousands of garages, one developer, one build standard
One community, one era, one repeated detail
Sun City Texas opened in June 1995 as a Del Webb age-restricted community, now under PulteGroup, and held roughly 8,500 homes as of 2021 against a planned buildout of about 10,550. That is the largest single block of garages anywhere in this city, put up by one developer working to one standard.
For a coatings crew that is unusually useful. Bay dimensions, joint layouts and the way an apron meets the driveway repeat from street to street, so we arrive already expecting the likely detail instead of discovering it. We still test the individual slab, because a repeated build standard is not a promise about the concrete in front of us.
Thirty years of continuous building is several slab generations
The community has been under construction continuously since 1995, which means a garage there can be nearly thirty years old or barely finished. A 1996 slab and a 2021 slab were poured under different practice, cured differently and do not behave the same way under a coating.
Some 90.9 percent of this city’s housing stock was built in 1980 or later, and post-tension slabs became common in Texas construction after roughly that line. We treat a residential slab here as post-tensioned until it is established otherwise, because coring, cutting or driving an anchor without locating tendons turns a floor job into a structural repair.
What the bay is actually used for
Residency in that community is restricted to people over 55, or to couples where one partner is, and the average resident age is reported at about 71. The garages we coat there hold golf carts, a workshop bench, a second refrigerator and stored belongings far more often than a daily commuter vehicle.
That changes the specification in two concrete ways. Hot tire pickup is a smaller governing risk than it is on a daily-driven bay, and slip resistance matters more than it would elsewhere, so we talk about coefficient of friction and the broadcast that delivers it rather than defaulting to the highest gloss available.
Looking for epoxy flooring closer to Santa Rita Ranch? See Santa Rita Ranch Epoxy Flooring.
Ground that barely moves, on the side of town nobody expects
Eckrant over rock outcrop
The soil survey at that community’s social center address maps an Eckrant-Rock outcrop association on 1 to 10 percent slopes: Eckrant at 58 percent of the map unit, rock outcrop at 16 percent and Tarpley at 11 percent. Rock outcrop at 16 percent means literal exposed limestone at the surface.
Eckrant there is a clayey-skeletal, smectitic, thermic Lithic Haplustoll: 42 percent clay with a plasticity index of 32 from the surface to 10 centimeters, then 45 percent clay and plasticity index 32 from 10 to 28 centimeters, and then bedrock. Linear extensibility runs 2.7 percent in the upper horizon and 3.7 percent in the lower one.
Clay content and movement are not the same number
A profile at 42 to 45 percent clay sounds like reactive ground, and it is not. Linear extensibility of 2.7 to 3.7 percent is low precisely because bedrock at 28 centimeters leaves almost nothing above the rock available to swell and shrink with the season.
The soil survey says the same thing in its own language. The official series description for Eckrant carries no crack statement at all, because there is no annual cracking regime to describe on a profile that stops at 28 centimeters. The largest concentration of garages in this city is therefore sitting on its steadiest ground.
The other side of the interstate, where the clay actually is
East and southeast of Interstate 35, inside these same city limits, the dominant soils are true Blackland Prairie Vertisols. Houston Black runs 54 percent clay, plasticity index 44 and linear extensibility 12 percent from the surface down to 178 centimeters. Heiden runs 12.0 to 12.2 percent and Branyon reaches 13 percent.
The official series descriptions for those soils each state that cracks remain open for 90 to 150 cumulative days in most years. On that ground a crack is a live joint rather than a repair: routed, filled with a semi-rigid polyurea joint filler, carried through the finish as a joint, and flagged in advance as something that can telegraph again.
Why we will not give one answer for the whole city
A factor of eight inside one set of city limits
A 43-point sample taken inside the city limits found a Mollisol as the dominant component at 36 points and a Vertisol at 7. Representative linear extensibility across those points ranged from 1.5 percent up to 13 percent. That is a factor of eight inside a single municipality.
The Balcones Escarpment is the reason. It runs through this city and the material on either side of it is not the same stuff, which is why we will not quote a crack detail off a phone call. Anyone stating one soil for the whole place is describing a different address than yours.
A surface read can badly understate what is beneath it
There is a soil series formally named Georgetown, and it is mapped in-city on the northwest side. Its surface horizon runs 30 percent clay with linear extensibility of 2.5 percent from the surface to 17 centimeters, which reads as quiet, well-behaved ground.
The horizon immediately underneath runs 70 percent clay, plasticity index 48 and linear extensibility 8.5 percent from 17 to 89 centimeters. A shallow look at that series understates the profile below it by a wide margin, which is the best argument going against judging a slab from whatever is visible at the top.
Moisture and preparation, tested rather than assumed
Moisture vapor emission through the slab is the most common cause of adhesion failure on residential concrete, so it is measured. Calcium chloride testing to ASTM F1869 or in-situ relative humidity probes to ASTM F2170 produce the number, ASTM F710 supplies the threshold, and a plastic sheet test to ASTM D4263 is a screening check rather than a substitute for either.
Preparation is mechanical every time: a diamond grinder or a shot blaster to an ICRI CSP profile matched to the system, with diamond segment bond hardness matched to the concrete rather than to whatever is already on the machine. We do not acid etch, and we do not coat over an existing sealer. Where one is present it comes off first with PCD tooling.
Buying a floor for a house you do not intend to leave
Owner-occupied detached is what this market is
There are 23,378 owner-occupied single-family detached units in this city, which is 95.1 percent of all owner-occupied households and 66.0 percent of occupied units of every kind. The city runs 69.5 percent owner-occupied overall.
That is a market of people improving a house they live in rather than preparing one for a handover date. On a long horizon the honest recommendation is usually the more expensive one, and we would rather set the arithmetic out and let you look at it than quietly steer around the question.
The system that earns a long horizon
A hundred percent solids epoxy body coat carrying a vinyl flake or quartz aggregate broadcast, sealed with a polyaspartic or polyurea topcoat, is a different class of floor from a thin roll-on kit. It is also a different class of preparation, and preparation is where most of the real cost sits.
Mil build and spread rate are numbers rather than adjectives, so they belong on the paperwork where they can be checked. A proposal that describes a finish in adjectives alone is not a proposal anyone can hold a contractor to, including us.
What we can and cannot show you on credentials
Texas licenses no flooring contractor, so there is no license number in this trade for anybody in this state to quote. A company telling you it is licensed for floor coatings in Texas is describing a document that does not exist, and that is worth knowing before you compare two bids.
What we can show is real and checkable: general liability cover, workers’ compensation, a Texas sales and use tax permit, and the general construction registration our home municipality issues. Warranty exclusions get read out before the job is sold, with substrate movement and moisture named first on the list.
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