Las Vegas • Henderson • North Las Vegas
Getting your slab flat, clean, and correctly profiled before new flooring or coatings go down.
Licensed
NV contractor license
Insured
General liability + WC
Dust-Controlled
Shrouded + HEPA filtration
15+ Years
Valley-wide floor prep
Prep by flooring type
We prepare the concrete — we don't sell you the coating or the flooring. That means the prep is built around your installer's system, not around a product we're trying to move.
Typically CSP 2–3
Coating systems bond mechanically, so the slab has to be opened, dry, and free of sealers, curing compound, and old film. We grind to the profile the manufacturer's data sheet calls for and leave the surface vacuumed and ready.
Epoxy prep detailsFlat, clean, no bond breakers
Large-format tile is unforgiving about flatness. We grind down high spots and old thinset ridges so the setter isn't building mortar to chase the slab, and lippage stays inside tolerance.
Flooring prep detailsFlatness first
Thin resilient plank telegraphs everything under it. Adhesive residue, paint drips, and small humps all show through, so prep here is mostly grinding flat and getting the slab genuinely clean.
Flooring prep detailsAggregate & finish decisions up front
Polishing is a finish, not just prep — cut depth determines whether you see cream, salt-and-pepper, or aggregate. We handle the removal and flattening passes that decide what the polisher has to work with.
Grinding detailsExplained simply
CSP is just a standardized way of describing how rough a concrete surface is — a scale from 1 (barely textured, like a light acid etch) to 9 (heavily scabbled and deeply gouged).
Think of it as sandpaper grit for the slab. A thin sealer only needs a whisper of texture. A troweled-on mortar system needs somewhere for a much thicker material to key into. Too smooth and the product sits on top and peels; too rough and thin coatings can't fill the profile, which shows up as pinholes and telegraphed texture.
We don't pick the number. Profiles follow the coating manufacturer's specification — send us the product data sheet and we grind to what it requires, then verify before handoff.
CSP 1
Acid etch / light grind
CSP 2
Grinding
CSP 3
Grinding
CSP 4
Light shotblast
CSP 5
Shotblast
CSP 6
Shotblast / scarify
CSP 7
Scarify
CSP 8
Scarify / scabble
CSP 9
Scabble
Illustrative scale only. CSP is defined by the International Concrete Repair Institute and confirmed on site against physical comparison chips.
Core scope
This is the bulk of what we do, and it's the step most often underestimated on a bid. What's stuck to your slab decides the tooling, the timeline, and whether the next floor holds.
After tile demo you're left with hard, ridged mortar bonded to the slab. It's ground off in passes with aggressive metal-bond tooling, then refined so the surface is flat rather than just knocked down. Leaving ridges is the single most common cause of telegraphing under LVP and lippage under new tile.
Soft adhesives smear and load up diamonds instead of cutting cleanly, so tooling selection matters more than horsepower. Black cutback in older Las Vegas buildings can contain asbestos — if the age or look of the material suggests it, testing and licensed abatement come before we touch it. We don't grind suspect material.
Coatings come off mechanically. We take the film to bare concrete rather than scuffing it, because a recoat over a failed bond just fails again on the original plane. Where a coating is genuinely sound, we'll tell you and profile it instead of removing it.
The invisible category. These leave the slab looking clean while quietly blocking every adhesive. A water-drop or solvent test tells us what's there, and grinding opens the surface back up.
Old feather-finish, drywall mud, paint overspray, and mortar splatter all get removed in the same pass so the finished slab is uniform edge to edge — including perimeters and thresholds, which are ground by hand.
Be realistic
Two slab conditions that decide more warranty claims than anything else — and there is no single number that covers every floor.
Requirements differ by flooring system. Large-format tile and thin resilient plank are strict; a heavy broadcast coating hides more. Grinding removes high spots efficiently, but it can't fill low ones — dips get patched or self-leveled, and whether that's in our scope or the installer's should be settled before anyone starts.
Las Vegas slabs are usually dry, but "usually" isn't a specification. Slab-on-grade with no vapor retarder, post-tension slabs, and anything that's seen irrigation or a leak can still read high. Each flooring system publishes its own limits, and testing is the only way to know. We flag the risk and coordinate testing rather than guess.
Comparison
Grinding doesn't automatically win — it's the right tool for most jobs, and acid etching still has a narrow place. The question is what the slab has on it and what's going down next.
| Factor | Mechanical prep (grinding) | Acid etching |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | Diamonds physically cut and open the surface | Acid reacts with cement paste to etch it |
| When it applies | Coatings, adhesives, sealers, high spots, unknown slab history | Small bare slabs, thin sealers, areas machines can't reach |
| Profile achieved | Controlled and repeatable, roughly CSP 1–3 by tooling | Light and inconsistent, generally CSP 1 at best |
| Removes coatings & glue | Yes | No |
| Flattens the slab | Yes — high spots and lippage come down | No — texture only |
| Residue & cleanup | Dry dust captured by shrouded HEPA extraction | Wet slurry that must be neutralized, rinsed, and vacuumed |
| Risk | Over-aggressive tooling can leave scratch patterns to refine | Leftover salts and moisture in the slab are a common bond failure |
Etching can make sense on a small, bare, uncoated slab with a thin sealer going down, or in a tight interior corner where no machine fits.
Etching is the wrong call when coatings, adhesive, or sealers are present, when the slab needs flattening, or when a coating warranty requires a verified CSP. That's grinding work.
FAQ
Free estimate
Have a slab that needs prep before flooring goes down?
Send the square footage, what's on the slab, and the product data sheet for what's going down — we'll scope the prep to spec.
