Epoxy Flooring in Mandan, ND

Epoxy flooring in Mandan usually goes into a garage that does real work. The city was founded in 1879 to serve the Northern Pacific, which set up a division headquarters here in 1881. That line is now BNSF, and more than 320 of its employees are based in Mandan. North of town, the refinery has run since 1954 and now has a nameplate capacity of 73,800 barrels a day with about 250 workers. People who work around rail yards and refineries tend to keep a serious shop at home, and the floor takes boots, fluids and heavy tools every day.

What a working floor needs

A coating for a Mandan shop garage has to deal with things a parking-only garage never sees. Here is what we plan for:

• Diesel, hydraulic fluid and brake cleaner that stain or soften weak finishes
• Rolling jacks, toolbox casters and engine stands that point-load the surface
• Dropped wrenches and sockets that chip thin coatings
• Winter slush mixed with sand and salt from both sides of the river

For these floors we usually recommend our Shop & Pole Barn Floor Epoxy, a thicker 100% solids build with a chemical-resistant topcoat. A medium flake broadcast adds grip when the floor is wet and makes drips easier to spot and wipe up.

Living behind the levee

The Heart River runs along Mandan's southern edge. After repeated floods, the Corps of Engineers turned over a completed levee system to the city in 1950. Prairie Public's Dakota Datebook puts its cost at $568,000 and says it spared about $2 million in damage during that spring's runoff. The levee most recently protected the city in 2019. In 2022 KFYR reported a project of more than $18 million to replace the floodwall, raise the levee and improve seepage control and interior drainage, so the system can be recertified for FEMA. The inundation area it protects stretches from downtown to the strip.

What that means for a floor: basements in the lower parts of town can see more ground moisture in a wet spring. We test every basement slab before we recommend Basement Floor Epoxy. If moisture is high, we tell you, and we do not coat over a problem that will push the coating off.

Get a Free Estimate

Older core, newer edges

Mandan had 24,206 people in 2020 and about 11,303 housing units in recent Census estimates. The older blocks near downtown were built up as the railroad grew, and many have detached garages with slabs that have been patched more than once. Newer homes on the edges of town have attached garages with tighter, smoother concrete. Both get a diamond grind. The old slabs need more crack and spall repair. The new ones need the factory sealer taken off so the base coat can grip.

Cold that tests the bond

Mandan's record low is −46°F and its record high is 115°F. A slab near an overhead door moves through that whole range over the years. Coatings that are only rolled onto smooth concrete tend to let go at the door first. A ground surface and a flexible, UV-stable polyaspartic topcoat hold up better at that edge. Polyaspartic also cures quickly, so a one-stall garage is not out of use for long.

Our order of work on a Mandan shop

1. Move-out check and protection for walls, benches and door seals 2. Diamond grind wall to wall, with edge grinding along the walls and around posts 3. Crack chasing and filling, plus patching where dropped tools have chipped the slab 4. High-solids epoxy base coat at shop thickness 5. Flake or aggregate broadcast for grip 6. Chemical-resistant topcoat, with written cure times before vehicles return