Case Study

Our team here at Smith and Company was called out to Broadway St. in Portland, Oregon to do some work at an empty commercial kitchen space. We were requested to clean, grind and fill any existing cracks. We then tackled the task of coating a commercial kitchen floor with a suitable floor coating material.

The state of the concrete before we arrived was in extremely bad condition. It was an old slab that had very soft concrete with many pits, holes and was covered in a thick layer of grease. One area of about 3-feet long was a trough that had worn into the floor from something dripping on it for years and was about 3-inches deep. We were given one week to tackle this project.

We started out by heavily grinding the surface of the floor to remove the grease and get down to some fresh concrete. We then went around and patched the rough areas using a 2-component epoxy filler. Once that was down we applied a 2-primer material combination of General Polymers GP5531 and GP5304.

These materials together work exceptionally well to coat over oily surfaces. We broadcasted sand into the GP3504 and then top coated the sand with a 20mill thick coat of GP4090 which is a polyurethane slurry. This was to help combat any residual grease that may have been in the concrete.

The project of coating a commercial kitchen floor was quite the challenge, but in the end, the customer and our team were very satisfied with the way it turned out. Check out some before and after photos below!

Before:

After:

 

The team at Smith and Company was called over to Dundee, Oregon, to complete a project at Archery Summit Winery. The task was to strip and remove the old wood sealer that was currently on the doors and to apply a fresh sealer. After facing some wear and tear from the weather and use, some of the old sealer was peeling off. Our timeline for this project was four days.

Our team started off using a paint stripper to completely remove the old sealer off the doors. The next step was to sand the surface of the doors. The door had been hit previously and was left with some rather dark scars. The sanding was intense to try to eliminate these scars and prep the doors for the application of a new sealer. The last step was that we applied four coats of a high solids Polyurethane which turned out looking amazing! Take a look at some of the before and after photos, it’s quite amazing how much of a difference this project did for these doors. The before pictures are on the left, followed by the after images.

 

  

 

These massive doors are now ready for whatever Mother Nature has to throw at them. The new seal now leaves them chemical and weather resistant. Archery Summit was very pleased with our team’s work!

The team at Smith & Company Flooring was called to polish a 9,000 square feet concrete floor at Boise Cascade, a manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon. Polishing a worn out concrete floor is no small task and the condition of the concrete floor was poor from extreme heavy use of large forklift traffic over the course of 30 years. Boise Cascade has tried to improve the quality by numerous patches and coating with epoxy but the results were failing.

The 150,000 square feet building hired us to develop a plan of improving the concrete condition. With 9,000 square feet to cover, we broke it down into doing 3,000 square feet over a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for three weeks.

Over the course of three weeks, we started the process with 16 grit diamonds to remove the old epoxy that Boise Cascade was previously using and then worked our way up to an 800 grit polish. Throughout the process, we applied a densifier and a couple coats of penetrating sealer to the slab. Take a look of some photos we captured during this process:

We are happy to report that Boise Cascade is extremely satisfied with our end product for they no longer have any old peeling epoxy on the floor. In addition, they loved the fact that not only does the floor look great, it is also very easy to clean. We left our happy customer with a maintenance plan to help them keep their improved concrete floor looking sharp for the years to come.

Recently the Smith & Company Flooring team was hired to clean, grind and apply a decorative chip broadcast epoxy floor system to a garage floor in Sherwood, Oregon. The detached garage was quite large at 850 square feet and we had just one day allotted to complete the job.

Before any job, it’s important to make note of the existing condition of the garage floor. This one was already in good shape as it was only a year old. We applied Polyaspartic to the floor and the end result had the floor looking great with ¼ inch brown flakes.

The best jobs go off without a hitch and a satisfied customer at the end. Mike loved his upgraded garage floor and we had no problems installing it. The new epoxy floor system will be very easy for Mike to clean and is stain and scratch resistant.

The before and after pictures of the job below were taken from the same angle so you can really see the difference: