Arlington Heights Epoxy Flooring has spent more than 20 years on epoxy flooring in Barrington and the villages around our home base, and the first thing we do on any job is look at the concrete rather than the house above it. A coating is only as sound as the slab it bonds to, so our quote is written after the floor has been inspected, not before.
That inspection is not a sales visit. We read the cracks, check what old coating or sealer is already on the surface, and put moisture testing into the scope as its own line item. If a slab needs repair before it can take a coating, we say so in plain terms and price the repair separately, so you can decide with the whole picture in front of you.
Every floor we install is mechanically opened with a diamond grinder or a shot blaster; we do not acid etch. The written proposal names the product, the system build and the finished thickness, which means you can hold the finished floor up against the paper and check that what was promised is what went down.
A Frame-Home District From 1860 to 1930, and the Floors Added Since
The Barrington Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 16, 1986. It covers 92 acres of southwest Barrington, roughly bounded by the old Chicago and North Western railroad, Spring and Grove Streets, Hillside and Coolidge, and Dundee Avenue. Its houses went up between 1860 and 1930, most of them built partly or entirely of wood, and almost 80 percent of them count as contributing to the district.
The village describes it as one of the largest frame-home districts in Illinois, with Folk, Craftsman, Victorian and other early American styles. Across Barrington as a whole, 575 of the 4,424 housing units were built in 1939 or earlier, about 13.0 percent of the stock.
The house is old; the slab may not be
On a house from that era, the concrete under the garage or the basement is rarely the same age as the framing. It may be a later pour, a full replacement, or an older floor patched in sections over the decades. Nothing about the date on the house tells us which one we are standing on, and the three behave very differently once a coating goes down.
That is why we never quote a floor in this part of Barrington from photographs or a phone description. Two homes on the same block can sit on slabs poured fifty years apart, with different thicknesses, different finishes and no way to know whether a vapor retarder was ever laid underneath.
Reading an older slab before quoting it
Our first test is often an ASTM D4263 plastic sheet test, which shows quickly whether moisture is moving up through the floor. Where the floor is headed for a full coating system, we follow it with ASTM F1869 calcium chloride testing or ASTM F2170 in-situ relative humidity probes, and compare the results against the thresholds the product is rated for.
We also map the cracks. Some are old shrinkage lines that have stopped moving; others run through a patch seam or step across a joint and are still active. A coating is a film that follows whatever the slab does underneath it, so we tell you before the job which cracks it will mirror rather than promising it will hold anything still.
If the readings call for it, the system starts with a moisture-mitigation primer under the 100% solids epoxy. When the slab is too far gone for that, we say plainly that it needs repair or replacement first.
Looking for epoxy-flooring closer to Lake Zurich? See Epoxy-Flooring in Lake Zurich.
What the Historic Overlay Reviews, and What a Floor Job Leaves Alone
The Village of Barrington set up a Historic Preservation Overlay District to protect areas of historic significance and keep redevelopment inside the district consistent with its character. Village of Barrington Development Services handles that work, alongside the village’s Architectural Review Commission.
Interior coatings and exterior changes are different questions
A coating applied to the inside of a basement or garage floor is interior work, and nothing we have read puts an interior floor in front of the Architectural Review Commission. Exterior changes inside the overlay are a different matter and go through village review.
That line can blur on a garage job. If the plan grows to include new overhead doors, a slab extension or a new apron, those touch the outside of the building, and we raise them with Development Services before anything is put on the calendar. We would rather settle the question at the planning stage than stop a job halfway through.
Which village, which fire department
Barrington is a home-rule village, chartered by the Illinois legislature on February 16, 1865, and it spans Cook and Lake counties and parts of Barrington, Palatine, Cuba and Ela townships. A 60010 mailing address does not settle which village is the permitting authority, so we confirm the jurisdiction from the property itself.
Fire service follows the same logic. Since January 1, 2014 the Barrington Fire Department has covered the village’s roughly five square miles on its own, while the Barrington Countryside Fire Protection District serves about 46 square miles of surrounding communities. A commercial floor just outside the village line answers to a different fire authority than one inside it.
Paperwork before the first pass of the grinder
Illinois issues no state license for flooring or coatings work, so instead of a license number we show the village contractor registration, bond and insurance that Barrington and its neighbors ask for. Every home job also 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.
The 1960s and 1970s Houses Outside the District
Most of Barrington’s housing is not in the historic district at all. The village counted 1,072 units built in the 1960s and 887 built in the 1970s, a combined 1,959 units and 44.3 percent of everything standing. Of the 3,368 owner-occupied homes, 2,863 are single-family detached houses, which is where most of our residential floor work in the village lands.
Basement floors from the postwar decades
Basement slabs of that age may have been poured with no vapor retarder of the kind ASTM E1745 now describes, and some show white efflorescence along the walls or around the floor drain. That powder is moisture leaving salts behind as it evaporates, and it is a clear sign the slab needs testing before anything bonds to it.
We detail sump pits and floor drains as part of the system rather than coating around them as an afterthought. We also do not sell a floor coating as radon reduction; in Illinois that work takes a radon mitigation license issued through IEMA, and a sealed floor is not a substitute for it.
Garage floors with decades of old finishes
A garage floor from the 1960s or 1970s has frequently been painted, sealed or coated at least once already. Those layers have to come off before a new system can bond, which is exactly what diamond grinding and shot blasting are for. We open the surface to a measured ICRI CSP profile that matches the product rather than guessing at it.
On a typical two-car garage we build a 100% solids epoxy base with a vinyl flake broadcast and a polyaspartic topcoat. We schedule the cure against slab temperature and the dew point spread at the surface, which is why an unheated garage sometimes has to wait for spring, and we read the warranty exclusions out before the job is sold, with moisture named first.
Service Floors on the Barrington Road Auto Campus
The largest commercial floor concentration in the village is the automotive campus along Barrington Road. Motor Werks of Barrington, whose 1475 S. Barrington Road address sits inside the village in Barrington Township, Cook County, is a 45-acre campus with BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac, Honda, INFINITI and Porsche dealerships. It is also one of the village’s top employers, with 355 people.
What a dealer service bay asks of a floor
Service floors on a campus like that take hot tires rolling straight off the road, dripped oil and coolant, dropped tools and the point loads of vehicle lifts. Hot tire pickup is the classic failure on a light-duty coating, and it is why service-bay systems lean on 100% solids epoxy, urethane cement or a quartz aggregate broadcast rather than a thin garage-grade product.
Vehicle brands often publish their own facility standards, and those may specify the floor finish for a showroom or service drive. Before we quote any dealership floor in Barrington, we ask for that brand standard so the system we propose matches what the manufacturer expects, not just what looks good on a sample board.
New construction on Dundee Road
A new Porsche showroom and service center is under construction at 24 E. Dundee Road. A fresh slab brings its own questions, most of them about moisture: new concrete has to give up water before a resin system goes on, and we test it the same way we would test a slab that is decades old.
Working around open hours
Commercial jobs are scheduled around the hours the building has to stay open, which on a service drive usually means phasing the work bay by bay or running nights and weekends. Floor coatings are chosen within the Illinois limits on VOC content under 35 Ill. Adm. Code Part 223, a rule that binds us as installers as well as the manufacturer, so the product list is settled before the first bay is closed.
- 20+ Years Coating Concrete
- Moisture Tested Before Quoting
- Itemized Written Proposals
