Epoxy Flooring in Dunkerton, IA

Epoxy flooring in Dunkerton covers two kinds of property. Inside city limits there are about 357 homes, counted in the 2020 census, most with a garage or a basement slab that has been through a lot of Iowa winters. Outside town, on the farms of Lester Township and beyond, the floors are bigger and tougher: shops, machine sheds and livestock buildings. We coat both, and the prep for each is quite different.

A town that moved to the railroad

Dunkerton exists because of a deal over a station name. In 1886 the Chicago Great Western built its line between Oelwein and Waterloo, and James Dunkerton offered right-of-way across his farm if the stop carried his name. The county surveyor platted the town that October. Over the following years, people and businesses left nearby villages like Lester, Blakeville and Gresham and moved closer to the tracks.

That history shows up in the housing. Some homes near the old core are well past a century old. Others went up in later decades on the edges of town. We see thin, hand-finished slabs in old detached garages and smoother, harder slabs in newer attached ones. Both can take a coating. Each needs a different amount of grinding and patching first.

Low ground along Crane Creek

Crane Creek runs through Dunkerton, crossed by the 1909 pedestrian bridge that still links Charma Park to town. When the public library was rebuilt, it opened in December 2010 on a site outside the flood zone. If your home sits on lower ground near the creek, plan the basement floor around that. We test the slab for moisture before we quote a basement coating. A damp slab gets a moisture-tolerant primer, or a frank conversation about fixing the water first.

Here is what we check in a creek-side basement:

• Dark rings or white mineral crust along the walls and floor joint
• Old paint lifting in sheets, which often means water is pushing up from below
• Cracks that are wet, stained or growing
• Whether a sump pit or floor drain is working and where it empties

Farm buildings after 2008

The May 25, 2008 tornado that struck Parkersburg and New Hartford stayed on the ground all the way to the Dunkerton area. Near Dunkerton it reached about 1.2 miles wide, and numerous hog containment buildings were destroyed. Outbuildings replaced after that storm sit on newer slabs than the farmsteads around them.

A working farm floor asks more of a coating than a house garage does. We use thicker 100% solids epoxy on shop floors that see tractors, skid loaders and dropped tools. Wash bays and areas where equipment drains get a textured broadcast so the surface is not slick when wet. If a slab has big cracks or spalled edges from years of heavy loads, our crack and floor repair work comes first.

Matching the service to the building

• Garage Floor Coating for the family garage that takes slush from county roads all winter
• Epoxy Flake Floors where you want a speckled surface that hides grit
• Polyaspartic Floor Coating when you need the garage back fast or the job falls in a cold month
• Basement Floor Epoxy after a moisture test, especially on lower lots
• Shop & Commercial Floor Epoxy for farm shops and machine sheds
• Concrete Crack & Floor Repair for old, heavily loaded or patched slabs