Bolingbrook Epoxy Flooring brings more than 20 years of epoxy-flooring work to Alsip, and much of what we think about here is the person crossing the floor rather than the vehicle parked on it. A coating in a room used by older adults has to stay grippy when it gets wet, sit flat at every edge and clean up without harsh scrubbing. Gloss and color come after those three.
Every slab we take on is opened with a diamond grinder or a shot blaster before any primer touches it. We never acid etch, because an etched surface gives the coating far less to hold, and a coating that lets go starts as a raised edge somebody’s toe can find. Moisture testing is written into the scope as its own line, and the proposal names the product, the system build and the finished thickness, so whoever signs off can check the floor against the paper.
That approach matters for a homeowner’s garage, and it matters more where one owner answers for hundreds of residents at once. In Alsip, that owner is the village itself.
A Village That Owns 512 Apartments
The Village of Alsip runs its own senior housing. Alsip Heritage is two apartment complexes, 512 units in all, set aside for residents 55 and older, and the village owns and manages both. That makes the village the landlord, the owner and the payer whenever a shared floor is replaced or recoated.
Heritage I and Heritage II
The village bought the Ridgeway complex in 1988 and remodeled all 168 apartments as Heritage I, adding an in-ground swimming pool and a clubhouse. In 1991 it bought Colonial Place, remodeled its 344 units as Heritage II, built a large clubhouse and fully rehabilitated the existing in-ground pool. The village’s senior housing is listed at 3715 W. 123rd Place, and that address falls inside village limits in Worth Township, Cook County.
How the Work Gets Paid For
The complexes run through a business-type enterprise fund, listed in the village’s financial reports as the senior citizen complexes fund. In fiscal 2020 that fund reported $4,910,889 in charges for services against $3,763,572 in expenses. The village describes the program as running without added cost to Alsip taxpayers, which means a floor project there is paid from the housing’s own revenue.
Why That Changes the Quote
A floor bought out of rent revenue gets scrutinized line by line, so our proposals are built to be read that way. Pricing is per square foot for the system actually proposed, never a national average. We walk the cracks, the joints and any old coating before we price anything, and if a slab needs repair before it can take a coating, the quote says so in plain words.
We also read the warranty exclusions aloud before anything is signed. Moisture comes first on that list, because it is the condition most likely to lift a coating from underneath. We have not seen the floors in either complex, so the sections below describe how we would approach rooms like these, not work already done there.
Looking for epoxy-flooring closer to Crestwood? See Crestwood Epoxy-Flooring.
Clubhouses, Laundry Rooms and Pool Decks
The shared spaces at a complex like Heritage take very different kinds of wear. A clubhouse floor sees chairs dragged across it, folding tables set up and taken down, and walkers and canes on every trip. A laundry room sees water on the floor, detergent drips and carts loaded with wet clothes. Storage rooms collect boxes, bins and the occasional scrape of a dolly.
Matching the System to the Room
For dry interior rooms, a 100% solids epoxy base with a vinyl flake broadcast and a polyaspartic or polyurea topcoat gives a durable floor that hides scuffs and cleans with a damp mop. In a laundry room we lean toward a fuller broadcast and a topcoat chosen to hold texture, since that floor is wet often and the residents using it are usually carrying something. Urethane cement is worth weighing in any room that sees steady water and cleaning products, because it tolerates heat and moisture better than a standard epoxy build.
Pool Decks and Changing Areas
A pool deck and the changing room beside it are where wet, bare feet meet concrete, and that combination sets the specification. We favor a quartz aggregate broadcast locked under a clear topcoat, sized for grip underfoot without being harsh on skin. Outdoor deck slabs also carry seasonal movement, so cracks and control joints are read and treated with a semi-rigid polyurea joint filler before the coating goes down.
Storage Rooms and Back-of-House Floors
Storage and mechanical rooms rarely get much attention, but they are where residents and staff move boxes, seasonal furniture and supplies on carts. A plain epoxy with a light flake broadcast, or a lithium silicate densifier on a sound slab, often makes more sense there than a full decorative build. Spending the budget where people actually walk is usually the better trade.
Testing Before Any Coating
Older slabs, especially ones near pools and laundry drains, can push moisture up from below. We use ASTM F2170 in-situ relative humidity probes or ASTM F1869 calcium chloride testing to measure that, and where readings run high, a moisture-mitigation primer is part of the system rather than an upsell after the floor blisters.
Slip Resistance and Flat Transitions for Residents 55 and Older
Slip resistance on a floor serving older residents is mostly a question of texture and how much of it survives cleaning. A smooth, high-gloss coating can look perfect and still turn treacherous with a film of water on it. We would rather leave a little more grit in the topcoat than produce a showroom finish that nobody can trust after a mop pass.
Building Texture Into the Floor
Texture can be added in two places: in the broadcast layer, using flake or quartz, or as a fine aggregate mixed into the final coat. We usually recommend a sample board with two or three texture levels, so the village’s maintenance staff can feel the difference with a wet shoe and judge how each one cleans. Rougher is not automatically better, since a surface that traps dirt gets slick in a different way.
No Lips at Doors or Drains
Trip hazards on a coated floor usually show up at the edges, where a new coating meets an old threshold, a carpeted hallway or a floor drain. We grind and feather those transitions so the coating finishes flush instead of leaving a raised step, and we pitch the coating toward drains rather than building a dam around them. A walker wheel should roll across the line between two surfaces without catching.
Where a coated floor meets a wall in a wet room, a coved base carries the coating a few inches up the wall. That removes the seam where water and grime collect, and it keeps the edge of the coating off the walking surface entirely, so there is nothing to lift and nothing to trip on.
Keeping It That Way
A textured floor only stays slip resistant if the cleaning routine leaves the texture alone, so we hand over written care instructions specific to the system installed. Recoat timing depends on traffic, and we would rather plan a topcoat refresh than wait until the grip has worn down in the busiest paths.
Working Room by Room, and Alsip’s Own Garages
Residents Stay Home
At an occupied complex, nobody moves out for a floor project. We sequence the work one room at a time, close off only what is being coated, and plan cure time so a clubhouse or laundry room is back in service on a predictable date. Floor coatings are selected within the Illinois limit on VOC content, which applies to us as installers as well as to the manufacturer, and low-odor systems keep air quality reasonable in a building where people are home all day.
Grinding dust is collected at the grinder, never swept or washed toward a floor drain or a storm inlet. Curing is scheduled against slab temperature and the dew point spread at the slab surface, not the calendar, which matters most on a pool deck in spring or fall. A topcoat laid down when the slab is too close to the dew point can develop amine blush, a waxy film that weakens adhesion between coats.
Pool decks add one more constraint, which is the swim season. The practical window is the stretch after the pool closes and before nights turn cold, or the weeks in spring before it opens. We would plan that window with the village well ahead, since a deck that cannot cure properly before opening day is a deck that gets done twice.
Alsip’s Houses Have Floors Too
Most of the village’s housing is owner-occupied, and a large share went up in the 1960s and 1970s, with the 1970s the busiest decade on record. Building nearly stopped after 2010, so a garage or basement floor here is typically a retrofit over a slab that has been in place for decades. That age brings old sealers, patched cracks and, in basements, the chance of moisture moving through the slab. A quick ASTM D4263 plastic sheet test can flag a problem, but we follow it with a measured test before we commit to a system.
What a Homeowner Can Expect
For a garage, we build the system to stand up to the calcium chloride brine and rock salt that ride in on tires through a Chicago-area winter. Every home job gets a written contract and the Home Repair: Know Your Consumer Rights pamphlet before work starts, as the Illinois Home Repair and Remodeling Act requires. Illinois licenses no flooring or coatings contractors, so we check the Village of Alsip’s own contractor registration, bond and insurance requirements before a job is put on the schedule.
We do not sell a floor coating as radon reduction, since that work requires an Illinois radon mitigation license. If an unheated garage is too cold to cure properly, we will tell you it has to wait for spring.
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