Polished Concrete and Overlays

Polished Concrete and Overlays in Cincinnati, OH

Polished concrete is not a coating. It is the slab itself, ground through progressively finer diamond grits and chemically densified until the surface is hard, light-reflective and effectively sealed by its own density. Nothing is sitting on top to peel.

That makes it the longest-lived floor finish available for a concrete substrate, and it is why warehouses, retail spaces, breweries and increasingly residential basements choose it. Maintenance is dust mopping and occasional auto-scrubbing, with no stripping and rewaxing cycle.

Where the existing slab is too damaged or too irregular to polish directly, River City Restoration installs a cementitious micro-topping or self-leveling overlay and polishes that instead, giving you the same finished result on a slab that could not have taken it otherwise.

Polished and overlay finishes we install

• Cream, salt-and-pepper and full aggregate exposure
• Matte, satin and high-gloss polish levels
• Self-leveling overlays on out-of-flat slabs
• Micro-topping skim coats over damaged surfaces
• Dyed and stained polished floors
• Densified and burnished warehouse floors
• Grind-and-seal for a lower-cost alternative
• Joint filling and crack repair prior to polish
• Restoration polishing of existing polished floors

Grind, densify, hone, polish, and the floor you already own is done

The first pass decides the look. Grinding shallow leaves the cream surface with almost no stone showing. Going deeper exposes the sand, and deeper still exposes the full aggregate, which reads almost like terrazzo. That choice is made on site with test patches, because how much stone is exposed at a given depth depends on your slab, not on a brochure.

After the cutting passes we apply a lithium silicate densifier, which reacts with free lime in the concrete to fill the pore structure and harden the surface. Everything after that is resin-bond polishing through finer grits until the target gloss is reached, followed by a penetrating stain guard.

Overlays add a step at the front: the existing slab is ground and primed, then the topping is pumped or troweled to a flat plane, allowed to cure, and polished exactly as a slab would be. It is the answer for floors with heavy patching history, old adhesive, or an inconsistent finish that would never polish uniformly.

Frequently asked about polished concrete and overlays