When does the epoxy floor go in when you finish a basement?
Usually after the drywall is hung, taped, sanded and painted, and before the baseboard, door casing, cabinets and any carpet in the bedrooms. The floor is the last wet trade in the room and the first finish trade, so it waits for the mud and the paint and goes down ahead of anything that gets fastened to a wall. That is the usual slot for a metallic epoxy floor in a lower level.
Each trade leaves something behind. Drywall dust settles on every surface for weeks, joint compound gets dropped and walked around, and a painter’s roller spits a fine mist along every wall. On bare concrete none of it matters. The grind takes it off. On a cured coating it means scratches and specks in a floor whose whole appeal is the clear depth of the pour.
Trim and cabinets that come after the floor sit on top of the coating and cover its edge. In a Prairie house where the basement was left as bare concrete around the furnace and the water heater, the owner or the general contractor running the finish sets the floor date with the installer once the painter has a finish date. A solid-color floor, the quieter choice, follows the same order.
Should the floor be coated before the walls are framed?
Some owners do it that way, and the case for it is real. With no walls in the way the slab is one open room, the grinder runs edge to edge, and the coating goes down as a single continuous floor under every wall to come. It is the easier floor to install. The trouble is the months of work that happen on top of it.
Framers snap chalk lines across it and shoot bottom plates through it into the concrete. Drywall follows, with mud buckets set down on the floor, sanding dust ground in under boots and ladders walked from room to room. A coating can come through that under paper and hardboard, taped and left down for the whole job, and some do. A metallic pour shows every scratch under the right light, though, and each fastener through a bottom plate is a hole through the coating, hidden by the wall and no longer sealed.
Coating after the walls avoids most of that. The coating runs to each wall and stops, and the baseboard covers the edge. The price is a slower grind into corners and closets, and a floor that is several rooms instead of one sheet.
Owners framing the basement themselves over a long winter, or planning one open room with a metallic pour flowing through it, tend to coat first and protect it hard. Owners hiring a crew to finish the whole space in a few weeks tend to coat after paint. At $11 - $16 per square foot installed for a metallic floor, a coat-first plan needs its protection settled before the framers show up.
Why does the moisture reading wait until the basement is closed in and heated?
A cold, open basement with the windows unfinished and no heat running is not the room the floor will live in. The in-slab test is meant to be read with the space at the temperature it will be lived at, so the reading comes after the windows are in, the walls are up and the heat is running in the room.
In practice the reading lines up with the paint. While the drywall crew finishes, the room is closed and warm, and the slab settles toward the condition it will hold all winter. The installer reads it near the end of that stretch. A winter finish helps here, since the heat has to be on for the mud to dry anyway.
If the reading fails, a mitigation primer is usually the answer, and it goes on the estimate before the pour is scheduled. How a basement slab here is tested, and what a pass or a fail means for the floor, is the basement rule on the metallic floors page. A house under a year old has a young slab on top of all this, and coating a new construction slab covers what that adds. A lower level with hot-water tubing in the concrete runs on its own heat schedule, laid out in the guide to a metallic floor over a heated lower level.
What does a new bathroom or wet bar in the basement do to the floor schedule?
It puts a strip of new concrete into an old slab. The plumber cuts a trench to run drain lines to the new bathroom or bar, and once the pipes are in, the trench is filled with fresh concrete. That strip has its own cure to finish before anything is coated over it, so the plumbing rough-in sets the earliest date the floor can go in.
Rough-in usually comes early, before framing closes the walls, so in most basements the trench has the whole drywall stretch to cure. Where a bar gets added late in the plan, or a line has to be dug up again, the patch becomes the thing the floor is waiting on.
The patch can also show. A trench line can telegraph through a coating, and through a metallic pour more than most, since the pigment settles differently over a seam that sits a hair high or a hair low. The installer grinds the patch flush with the old slab and fills its edges so the floor reads as one surface. It is a fair question to ask when the estimate is written.
Inside the bathroom the coating either runs to the shower base or stops where the tile begins, and that edge gets settled with the tile setter before either trade starts. The floor around the drain and the rest of the bathroom get grit in the top coat, like anywhere else feet are wet.
How long does the basement sit empty after the pour, and which trades wait for it?
Feet can usually go on the floor the next day. Everything heavier waits for the cure window written on the estimate, which runs longer in a cool lower level than in a warm room upstairs. Until then the basement stays empty, and the trades held back come back in roughly this order:
- cabinet installers, for the bar and the bathroom vanity
- the trim carpenter, for baseboard and door casing, working carefully at a floor that is still young
- carpet layers, in a bedroom or den where the coating ends at a transition strip
- furniture last, with felt pads under anything that slides
The stair is a separate decision. A coated stair matches the floor, but the nosings are slow hand work and the treads need grit, or the stair becomes the slickest spot in the house. Plenty of owners keep the stair carpeted or wood and coat to the bottom landing, ending the floor at the first riser. When the stair is coated, it goes in with the floor, and the household plans the cure around a basement it cannot reach.