How a Condo Board Buys a Garage Floor Coating
What belongs in a proposal a board can vote on, how a multi-stall shared garage gets phased around residents, and how the total converts into a per-unit number.
A board is not buying a floor. It is buying a decision that has to survive a vote, an owner complaint and an audit. That changes two things about a shared garage floor coating and almost nothing else. The proposal has to arrive in a form the board can act on and file, and the schedule has to be measured in stalls out of service per day rather than square feet per day. The work itself - diamond grind, polyurea base, flake broadcast, polyaspartic topcoat, a flat $8/sq ft - is identical to what goes into a single-family garage. Here is the part that is not.
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Repair, or alteration?
Answer this before you collect a single quote. The classification decides whether the board can act on its own authority, whether reserve money is available, and whether an owner vote attaches. It is a question about your declaration and your state condominium act, so it belongs with association counsel - but knowing the shape of the rules tells you what to ask.
| Issue | Wisconsin, Wis. Stat. ch. 703 | Illinois, 765 ILCS 605 |
|---|---|---|
| Routine authority | An annual budget adopted and distributed to every owner, listing anticipated common expenses, reserve allocations and any assessment levied (s. 703.161(2)) | A board-adopted annual budget under 605/18(a)(8) |
| Reserve money | Statutory reserve funds may go to repair and replacement of common elements other than routine maintenance (s. 703.163(8)(a)); other uses need written consent of two-thirds of unit votes and repayment inside 3 years | Governed by the declaration read alongside 605/18 |
| Owner pushback | Association decisions carry on a majority of owners present and voting unless the bylaws set a higher bar (s. 703.15(4)(e)) | If the year total of regular plus separate assessments would top 115% of the prior year, owners holding 20% of votes may petition within 21 days; the board calls a meeting within 30 days, and it stands unless a majority of all votes reject it |
| Additions and alterations | Set by the declaration - read it | Assessments for additions and alterations to common elements not in the adopted budget need approval of two-thirds of the total votes of all unit owners |
| Emergency spending | Per the declaration | Expenditures for emergencies or mandated by law skip those votes; emergency is defined as immediate danger to structural integrity or to life, health, safety or property |
| Meeting notice | At least 10 days written notice to every unit owner (s. 703.15(4)(c)) | Per declaration and bylaws |
Source text for those rows sits in the Wisconsin statutory reserve account provisions and in 765 ILCS 605/18. This is general information rather than legal advice, and a declaration can be stricter than the statute on every line. The practical takeaway: the same job can be a board decision in one association and a two-thirds owner vote in the building across the street, and you want that settled before a number circulates.
What a board packet has to contain
A homeowner quote is a price and a date. A board packet is an exhibit. These are the items that separate the two.
- Stall count and square footage by level and by phase, not one lump figure. Boards get asked to justify the number, and a lump figure cannot be justified.
- Unit rate and extended total. Ours is $8 a square foot for standard work, so any director can check the arithmetic.
- A phase map with dates, listing the stall numbers going offline in each phase and the hours they stay offline.
- A resident notice ready to send, with lead time. Most complaints here are notice failures, not floor failures.
- Certificate of insurance for general liability, workers compensation and auto, association named as additional insured.
- W-9 and lien waivers, partial at each progress payment and final at closeout.
- The written workmanship guarantee, exclusions included, in the packet rather than summarized verbally.
- A ventilation and odor plan for an enclosed or below-grade deck. Air handling is the board question that always arrives late.
- A unit rate for slab repair found after grinding. Price it in advance; this is the line that turns a clean board number into a change order argument.
The short version
Classify the work first, because that decides the vote and the funding source. Then quote it by phase, not by building. A stall goes offline for one night, not one week. Standard work is $8/sq ft, and the only number that surprises boards is post-grind slab repair, so get a unit rate for it in writing before you vote.
Stalls per day, the number that governs everything
Residents do not experience square footage. They experience whether their car has somewhere to go tonight. Work the schedule backward from that.
| Input | Working figure |
|---|---|
| Stalls on the level | 40 |
| Gross area per stall including drive-aisle share | about 300 sq ft |
| Level area | about 12,000 sq ft |
| Grind through topcoat, one crew shift | 2,000 to 2,500 sq ft |
| Stalls per phase | 7 to 8 |
| Phases for the level | 5 to 6 |
| Calendar, weekdays only | roughly two working weeks |
| Spare stalls needed at any one moment | 8 |
The line that usually carries the vote is the return-to-service window. A stall coated in the morning is walkable that evening and holds a parked car 24 to 48 hours later, so a resident loses one night, occasionally two. Our guide to floor coating cure time covers why that is chemistry rather than optimism.
Need a board-ready number for your garage?
Square footage in, an all-inclusive figure out. About 60 seconds.
How stalls get sequenced
| Sequence | How it runs | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Contiguous block | Seven or eight adjacent stalls, walking down the row | Cleanest seams and simplest signage; concentrates the disruption on neighbors |
| By column bay | Phase edges land on structural lines and existing joints | Best-looking finished floor; bay size rarely matches a shift exactly |
| Alternating stalls | Not workable | A grinder and a squeegee cannot operate on a nine-foot island between parked cars |
Most garages end up on contiguous blocks with the phase edges nudged sideways to land on a joint or a column line. Insist on that. A seam that stops mid-bay announces itself under every overhead light from then on, while one buried in a saw-cut simply is not there.
Two things that go wrong in a shared garage
The car that does not move. Every building has one: a snowbird, an absentee owner, a project car on flat tires. A crew that arrives to an occupied stall loses the phase and the association pays for the mobilization. Handle it on paper - notice with real lead time, exact stall numbers and dates, and a reference to the association authority to relocate a vehicle, confirmed against the rules before it goes out.
The deck is not one slab. An on-grade level and a suspended structural deck are different jobs. Post-tensioned decks cannot be cored or anchored without scanning first, and where a deck already carries a traffic-bearing waterproofing membrane, a floor coating is not a replacement for it - separate product, separate scope, and a bidder who blurs the two is selling you a problem. Below-grade levels add moisture drive and efflorescence, tested before a system is chosen rather than discovered after.
Where the coating starts and stops
- Striping and stall numbers. Grinding takes them off and new lines go down over the cured clear. Settle the layout while the deck is bare, accessible stalls and their access aisles included, since those have to stay usable throughout and come back exactly as they were.
- The ramp. Slope plus meltwater plus a car that just came off a salted street. The ramp gets a more aggressive texture than the flat deck.
- The entry apron and the first drive lane. This is the worst chloride exposure anywhere in the building. In an enclosed, warmed deck in Kenosha, Racine or along the North Shore, cars park and drip brine for hours and nothing ever rinses it away, so the salt concentrates instead of washing off the way it does on an open lot.
- Trench drains and the curb line. Terminated into the drain body and up the curb face, not feathered out nearby.
Paying for it phase by phase
Association payment mechanics should not look like a homeowner contract. No large deposit up front. Progress payments tied to completed, inspected phases, each release exchanged for a partial lien waiver, and final payment against the final waiver plus a joint walkthrough. That reconciles cleanly at audit and protects the association if a job stalls halfway down the level. It is also a fair test of a bidder, since a company that needs half the money before it owns a grinder is telling you something about its balance sheet.
Turning a total into a per-unit number
Do not divide by the number of doors. Wisconsin apportions assessments in proportion to each owner percentage interest in the common elements unless the declaration provides otherwise (s. 703.16(2)(a)), and Illinois declarations allocate the same way. So the sequence is: total the job, then apply the percentages from the declaration.
At $8/sq ft, that 12,000 square foot level comes to roughly $96,000, with prep, slab patching, base, broadcast and clear all priced in. Across 40 units at equal interest that is about $2,400 a unit, but equal interest is an assumption to verify rather than a default. If the association also has a shop, a trash room or a maintenance bay to price, the same rate applies and the logic sits in our commercial and shop floor guide and on the commercial flooring service page. We cover Lake County, Kenosha County and the suburbs south of Milwaukee, and we will walk a deck with a board committee before anything reaches a vote.