A polished concrete floor is the slab you already own, ground flat and refined until it holds a sheen on its own. No coating sits on top. We are a concrete contractor, and most of our week is flatwork: driveways, a sidewalk here, a patio in stamped concrete there. Polishing is the same material read from the other direction. Instead of finishing a fresh pour, we open an existing slab, harden it with densifier, and close it back down.
Work starts on the bare slab, with everything off the floor and the room shut off from the rest of the house. We grind in passes, each one finer than the last, and check the surface between them with a light held low. Densifier goes down once the pore structure is open. Dust gets pulled at the head of the machine rather than swept up afterward. The last passes are slow, and slow is where the clarity comes from.
Trouble usually comes from whatever is under the old covering. Houses around here run to a median build year of 1971, so slabs come up carrying cutback adhesive, tile thinset, a patch somebody poured over a plumbing repair, or a crack that has been moving for decades. None of that is fatal. It does decide how the floor reads when it is done, because grinding reveals a slab's history rather than hiding it.
Getting it right is mostly a question of how much grinding the slab needs before it is worth polishing, and the floor decides that, not us. A clean, flat pour comes up quickly. A patched one takes days of prep nobody ever sees. We would rather say that at the start than surprise you halfway through. Call for a free estimate on a floor in Savannah or out toward Pooler, and bring what you know about the slab: its age, what has been glued to it, where it has cracked.
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We grind the existing slab with progressively finer diamond tooling, densify it, then polish to the sheen you want. Older slabs hide problems: hairline cracks, patched plumbing trenches, rebar or wire mesh sitting too high. We map those first. As a concrete contractor we also pour flatwork, stamped concrete, commercial concrete and concrete sidewalk work.
Polished concrete floors start with the slab already under your house. We grind the surface through progressively finer diamond steps, densify it so the top layer resists wear, then bring it up to the sheen you want. Nothing gets laid on top. The floor is the concrete itself, refined, which is why it takes furniture, dog claws and a wet mop year after year without complaint. Plenty of homes here have a slab worth uncovering, sitting quietly under carpet or vinyl that gave up a decade ago.
Median build year in Savannah is 1971, so the concrete under most of these floors has had roughly fifty years to cure and stop moving. That works in your favor. An old slab is hard, fully dry, and long past the shrinkage that makes fresh flatwork unpredictable under a polisher. It also carries its history. Adhesive from three generations of flooring, a patched plumbing trench, a hairline crack that opened early and settled down. We read all of that first.
Coverage runs across Savannah, Georgia and out to Pooler, Bluffton and Hilton Head Island, and it is the same crew and the same equipment wherever the address falls. A slab in one of those towns gets the same grinding sequence and the same standard as a slab in any other. We schedule by what the job needs, not by how far the truck has to go. If you are inside that range, call for a free estimate.
Most of what goes wrong traces back to somebody skipping the assessment. A slab poured soft on top will expose aggregate faster than expected, which is fine if that is the look you wanted and a problem if it is not. Old patches take polish differently than the concrete around them. Moisture coming up through a slab with no vapor barrier will haunt a coated floor. We tell you what we find, including the parts that are not what you hoped.
Getting a floor right is mostly a matter of not rushing the early passes. The first cuts set the flatness and decide how much aggregate shows, and no amount of fine polishing later will fix a sloppy start. We contain dust, keep the shop vacs running, and work in sequence rather than jumping ahead to the shine. That is slower than some outfits move. It is also why the floor still looks like this in ten years.
We walk the slab with you and read what is already there: moisture, hairline cracking, old glue and paint, how water leaves the edges. On exterior work we probe the subgrade, since soft ground under driveways turns into settlement cracks a year after the pour.
The estimate comes in writing, broken out by scope: square footage, slab thickness, reinforcement, finish, joint layout. Where the job touches a public sidewalk or a street approach, permits and inspections are part of that paperwork, and we handle them before any concrete installation begins.
Old slab comes out in pieces and leaves the site. Then we cut the subgrade to depth, bring in graded aggregate base, and compact it in lifts. Skipping compaction is why so many concrete driveways crack along the wheel tracks within a few seasons.
Forms go in on grade and get staked straight. Steel follows: rebar tied on chairs where a concrete driveway carries vehicle loads, welded wire mesh on lighter flatwork. We place the mix, screed and float it, then cut control joints so cracking lands where we put it.
Finish depends on the surface: broom texture for sidewalks, a ground and polished face for interior floors, stamped or exposed aggregate where you want pattern. Curing gets protected for days, not hours. Last, we walk the finished work together and note anything that needs attention.
Two driveways of the same size can price out far apart, and the difference is almost always in the conditions rather than the concrete. Here is what we look at on a walkthrough. Most of it you can check yourself before anyone hands you a number.
| What changes the price | Which way | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Old slab, asphalt or pavers that have to come out first | costs more | Tear-out, hauling and disposal are their own job before a single yard of concrete arrives. |
| How close the truck gets to the pour | costs less when it backs right up | Concrete moved by wheelbarrow or pump takes more hands and more time than a chute reaching the forms. |
| What is already in the ground: irrigation, gas, roots, old footings | costs more | We hand dig around anything buried, and roots or a forgotten footing change how the subgrade gets prepped. |
| Slab thickness the use calls for | thicker costs more | A patio and a driveway that parks a work truck are not the same pour. |
| Rebar versus wire mesh, and how tight the spacing runs | heavier reinforcement costs more | It is material plus the labor to tie it and chair it up off the grade. |
| Which way the site drains | costs more when water runs toward the house | Slope, a thickened edge or a drain line gets built into the flatwork instead of fixed later. |
| Finish: broom, stamped, colored, exposed aggregate | broom costs less | Stamped and colored work takes more crew on the slab inside a shorter working window. |
| Permits and inspection through the City of Savannah | costs more | Sidewalk and apron work in the right of way is permitted and inspected, and that time sits in the bid. |
Compare bids on the spec, not the total. Ask each contractor for thickness in inches, the reinforcement and its spacing, whether tear-out and haul-off are included, how the subgrade is prepped, where the control joints fall, and who pulls the permit. When two bids describe different work, the cheaper one usually says less.
Yes. A shop floor is where polished concrete makes the most sense, because the slab is already there and the finish holds up under wheels, dropped tools and rolling loads. Forklift traffic burnishes it rather than tearing it up. Oil wipes off a densified surface instead of soaking in. The main thing to check is whether the existing slab is flat and sound enough to take the grind.
No, but it does not hide them either. Polishing exposes what the slab already is, so hairline cracks and old patches stay visible after the finish goes on. We fill structural cracks and joints with semi-rigid filler before the final passes, which stabilizes the edges and keeps them from spalling. A honed finish or a heavier aggregate exposure draws the eye away from small imperfections better than a mirror gloss does.
It depends on the square footage, the condition of the slab and how many grit passes the finish calls for. A single room in a house moves quickly. A shop or a retail space with heavy grinding, crack repair and multiple densifier applications takes longer, and the floor has to stay clear of traffic between steps. We walk the slab first and give you a schedule before anything starts.
Dust mop it, then damp mop with a pH-neutral cleaner. That is the whole routine. No wax, no stripping, no annual recoat. Acidic cleaners will dull the surface over time, so keep vinegar and citrus products off it. In a commercial space, an auto scrubber with the right pad keeps the shine up on its own. Grit tracked in from outside does the most wear, so mats at the doors help.
Anywhere from a flat matte to a full reflective finish, set by how far up the grit sequence we go. Stopping around 400 grit gives a satin sheen that reads clean without glare. Running to 1500 or 3000 produces the mirror look people picture. Higher gloss shows footprints and dust sooner, so a shop usually lands lower than a showroom does.
Most slabs can be polished. Around here a lot of houses date to about 1971, and those slabs are often good candidates once the old adhesive, tile mastic or carpet glue comes up. What rules a slab out is deep structural failure, heavy settlement or a surface too soft to take a diamond. We grind a test patch to find out before committing.