What Comes Up Before Anything Goes Down
Tile is the usual answer, and it is worth knowing what that involves before you commit to it. The tile itself comes up, and so does the adhesive bed underneath, because a coating bonded onto old thinset is only ever as good as the thinset. We grind the slab back to bare, open concrete, which is the surface a base coat can key into. It is the noisiest and dustiest day of the job, and it is also the day that decides whether the floor you end up with lasts.
What you are left with is usually better than people expect. A slab that has been under tile for years has been protected for years, so it tends to be sound, and what does show up is cuts, old fixings and the occasional crack. Those get cut out, filled and ground flush so they do not telegraph through the finish. You see the concrete bare before any color goes on, which is the point where anything that needs deciding gets decided. The material side is set out in full on our Phoenix page: how the epoxy and polyaspartic layers work together.
