Epoxy flooring in Homewood, Alabama

Epoxy Flooring Birmingham covers Homewood for basement floor coatings, garage floors, patios and driveways. Edgewood, Hollywood, Rosedale and the streets around 18th Street South are the areas we are in most often.

Basements are the main job here

Unlike most of the metro, more than half our Homewood work is basements rather than garages, and there is a straightforward reason. The housing is old enough to have real basements, the lots are small enough that people finish them rather than extending, and the slabs are old enough to need testing first.

Homewood's bungalows largely date from the 1920s through the 1940s, with the Edgewood and Hollywood neighbourhoods built out in that period. Those basements have concrete floors poured decades before polyethylene vapour barriers became standard practice.

That means water vapour moves up through the slab, and it means a low-permeability coating laid over an untested floor can blister within two years.

So Homewood basements start with a calcium chloride test or relative humidity probes, not with a colour chart. It adds a visit and it is by far the cheapest part of the job.

Finishing a basement as living space

The common Homewood project. A basement becomes a den, a playroom, a home office or a guest suite, because the lot is too small to extend outward and the neighbourhood is worth staying in.

That changes the finish. A garage floor wants heavy full broadcast and maximum texture. A living space wants something finer and lighter.

Lighter blends make a partly below-grade room feel noticeably larger, which matters when the only natural light comes from small windows near the ceiling. Partial broadcast reads as a designed floor rather than a workshop one. And smoother scraping makes it comfortable underfoot and easy to sweep, which matters in a room people sit in.

Where the basement is going to be a gym, which happens often, see gym floor coating for why rubber matting over an untested slab is worth avoiding.

Detached garages on narrow lots

The classic Homewood arrangement: a single or one-and-a-half car garage at the end of a narrow driveway down the side of the house, often original to the property.

Small floors, which cuts both ways. The total price is modest. The price per square foot is higher, because setup, edge work and mobilisation do not scale down with area.

Access is the practical issue. Some Homewood driveways are genuinely narrow, with a fence one side and the house the other, and getting a grinder and extraction down them takes planning. Worth mentioning when you call.

These garages also frequently have old paint on the floor, sometimes several layers of the grey and red porch paints that were standard for generations. It all comes off by grinding and it is usually thicker than it looks.

What the drainage outside is doing

On small lots with houses close together, water management matters more than people expect, and it is often the real cause of a damp basement.

Gutters discharging at the foundation, downspouts without extensions, and the ground sloping back toward the house are all common on properties of this age. Each of them keeps loading the soil around your basement with water.

Where we find that, we will say so. Sometimes the right advice is to spend a few hundred dollars outside before spending thousands inside, and we would rather tell you that than coat over the problem.

Patios and the back of the house

Homewood back gardens are small and heavily used, and the patio is often the main outdoor space rather than an addition to a lawn.

Mature tree cover across much of Homewood means shade, and shade means damp surfaces through the winter and algae on anything porous. A sealed surface washes off; bare concrete stains.

It also means leaf litter and tannins for months of the year, which stain open concrete stubbornly.

Grip matters on shaded patios and paths for the same reason. See patio coating.

Working in a tight neighbourhood

Houses in Homewood are close together and grinding is noisy. We work normal hours and we contain the dust, but it is worth telling your neighbours if you are on a particularly tight street.

Parking is the other practical matter. On some Homewood streets there is nowhere obvious to put a van, and knowing that in advance saves everybody a morning.

The honest version

If your basement is dry, tested, and you want it finished, this is a straightforward job with a good result.

If it is damp, or smells musty, the floor is not the first thing to spend money on. A musty smell means moisture is present somewhere, and sealing the floor over it traps the problem rather than solving it.

We will test, tell you what the readings say, and be straight about whether the answer is a mitigating primer, drainage work outside, or in a small number of cases a floating floor with an air gap rather than a bonded coating at all.

For the detail on basements, see basement floor coating. For the garage down the side, garage floor coating.