Commercial floor finishing over the floor you already have.

Once air at 10 degrees outside is warmed to 70 indoors, the relative humidity in the building collapses. Heated interiors here commonly run 15 to 25 percent through the winter, and buildings that actively humidify still sit around 30 to 40. Every one of those readings is comfortably inside the limit. August is the hard month, when a humid building takes dehumidifiers running before anything can be mixed.

Fall is when floors get looked at and budgeted, because the work happens months later. Winter break is the biggest window outside summer: two weeks of an empty school with the driest air of the year in it. January and February are the retail reset and the slowest weeks a restaurant has. Spring picks up what the winter breaks could not fit. A floor being talked about in September is usually a floor being coated in December.

The area being coated has to be closed off and stay closed until it is dry, but nothing else stops. Corridors get done in sections, restrooms one at a time, and foot traffic returns in 4 to 5 hours on the fast formula. The finish is low odor and low VOC, 46 g/L in gloss and 25 in matte, which is why this work goes into occupied clinics and restaurants overnight instead of waiting for a shutdown.

Classrooms and corridors are almost always VCT, the cafeteria and the main lobby are often terrazzo in anything built before the 1980s, and the restrooms and locker rooms are tile. Terrazzo in particular has usually been under acrylic so long that nobody in the building has seen what it actually looks like. Winter break and spring break are the windows, and they get scheduled months out.

Corridors, patient rooms and therapy areas are VCT or LVT; restrooms, shower rooms and soiled utility are tile and grout. These buildings have the shortest recoat cycles of anywhere, and the reason is chemical rather than traffic: the quaternary disinfectants used in clinical areas break acrylic finish down directly, so the rooms that get cleaned hardest are the rooms that dull first. A urethane finish is not attacked the same way.

The kitchen and the restrooms are tile and grout, and the dining room is usually VCT or sealed concrete. Grout is what gets these looked at: it holds mop water, it holds what the kitchen puts on the floor, and it is what a health inspector notices. January and February are the weeks with the room to do it.

Narthex and lobby floors in older buildings are frequently terrazzo, the fellowship hall or community room is VCT, and the restrooms are tile. These are the buildings most likely to have been quoted a grind and polish on a floor that only needs the wax taken off it. Weekdays are the window, and the sanctuary calendar sets the rest.

Sales floors, showrooms and breakrooms are often polished or sealed concrete, with VCT through the back of house. Where forklifts, pallet jacks or vehicles run, this finish is the wrong product and the polyurea system on our commercial floor coatings page is the right one. A building with both gets both, and we will say which line goes where on the walk.