Bubbles, Pinholes, and Orange Peel: What Counts as a Defect?
How to tell normal coating texture from a real application defect in a day-old floor, what the crew looks for before it leaves, and which cosmetic conditions the workmanship guarantee covers.
Some of what you are looking at is normal texture and some of it is a genuine defect, and one simple test separates them. Get up, stand normally, and look at the floor in the light you will actually live with. If the thing you noticed disappears when you stop hunting for it at knee height with a flashlight, it is texture. If you can see it standing up, catch a fingernail in it, or press it and feel it give, it is a defect and it should be flagged. Below is each condition by name, what causes it, which side of that line it falls on, and what the guarantee does about it.
On this page
Each condition, named and sorted
Half the confusion here is vocabulary. Six different things get called bubbles, and they have six different causes and six different answers.
| Condition | What you see | Usual cause | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orange peel | Fine, even stipple across the whole surface | Normal behavior of a rolled film | Texture |
| Pinholes, base coat | Pin-prick holes, buried under flake and topcoat | Air leaving the concrete | Texture, invisible in the finish |
| Pinholes, finish coat | Open pin-prick craters in the clear layer | Outgassing through the last pass | Defect |
| Blisters | Raised domes you can feel and press | Gas or vapor trapped under the film | Defect, always |
| Fisheyes and craters | Round bare spots with a raised rim | Silicone, oil or tire dressing on the slab | Defect |
| Dust nibs and insects | Occasional specks sealed in the clear coat | An open garage door during cure | Texture unless clustered |
| Lap marks and holidays | Visible roller edges or thin, dull streaks | Application, wet edge lost | Defect |
Two of those deserve a sentence more. Orange peel is the same effect you get on rolled wall paint, and on a full flake floor it is functionally invisible because the chip relief is a much stronger texture than the stipple is. And a stray insect in the clear coat is the price of curing a floor in a building with a door on it. One or two is a garage. A dozen in one square yard is a crew that did not manage its containment.
Why outgassing happens at all
Concrete is full of connected air pockets. When the slab warms, the air inside them expands and has to go somewhere, and if there is a wet coating on top it goes out through that. The result is a bubble that either stays domed or bursts and leaves a small crater, which is what the resinous flooring trade calls outgassing.
The controllable part is direction. Air pushes up when the slab temperature is rising and stays put when it is steady or falling. That is why scheduling matters more than product choice here. In an unheated attached garage in Kenosha or Gurnee, a shoulder-season day can swing twenty-five degrees between the 7am grind and the early afternoon, and an open overhead door pointed at the sun turns the slab into a heat sink that keeps giving all afternoon. A crew that reads that and times the base coat for a flat or falling slab temperature simply does not generate many pinholes.
Two other sources are worth knowing. Moisture moving up through the slab from below produces blisters rather than pinholes, and it is a different problem with a different fix. It gets ruled out before anything is applied by taping a square of clear plastic to the slab overnight and checking for condensation the next morning, the plastic sheet test for slab moisture. And mixing too hard whips air straight into the resin, which is entirely on the installer.
The short version
Stand up and look normally. Even stipple and the odd sealed speck are texture. Domes you can press, open holes in the clear coat, bare round craters and roller lines are defects. Blisters are never normal. A defect found in the first weeks gets fixed under the workmanship guarantee at no cost.
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The check the crew runs before leaving
Once the topcoat has firmed to a tack-free state, the floor gets inspected on purpose rather than glanced at. The method is deliberately awkward, because defects hide from overhead light.
Raking light. A work light is set on the floor at one end of the bay and the inspector looks along the beam, almost down the plane of the surface. At that angle every change in texture throws a shadow: a blister, a crater, a lap line, a flake gap. Nothing else reveals a floor the same way, and no ceiling fixture will do it.
Bay by bay, in a grid. The floor gets walked in lanes rather than wandered, so the light moves and the same square gets seen from more than one direction.
Hands, not just eyes. Suspect areas get a flat palm and the edge of a plastic scraper. A blister that has not broken feels hollow long before it looks like anything.
The edges last. Perimeter cut lines, the coved base if there is one, the threshold at the overhead door, and anywhere the crew had to work around a post or an anchor. Those are the places a rushed job shows first.
Blue tape on everything questionable. Marking is cheap and arguing later is not. Anything taped is either corrected before the crew leaves or written down as a return visit.
There is one more pass that most companies skip. Some outgassing pinholes only open properly once the film has fully hardened, which is well after the crew drove away. So the honest position is that the inspection is not finished on install day, and a second look a few days later is part of the job, not a complaint. Our guide to coating cure times covers what the floor is doing in that window.
What the guarantee covers
A workmanship guarantee is about application, so the line runs between what the crew controlled and what the material simply does. Everclad covers the first list and does not pretend the second list is a fault.
| Covered as a defect | Normal, not covered |
|---|---|
| Blisters and raised bubbles | Fine, even orange peel stipple |
| Open pinholes in the finish coat | Pinholes buried in the base coat |
| Fisheyes and craters | The texture of the flake itself |
| Bare spots, holidays, thin streaks | An occasional sealed dust speck or insect |
| Visible roller lap marks | Slight sheen shift under raking light |
| Flake gaps and uneven broadcast | Saw-cut joints remaining visible by design |
| Peeling, lifting and loss of bond | Damage caused after handover |
Correcting anything in the left column is covered by the agreed $8/sq ft rate. The area is abraded, re-flaked where the broadcast is affected, and recoated. It is not a change order and it is not a negotiation, because the defect was ours. For how to read guarantee language before you sign anything, see our guide to coating warranties.
If you spot something after handover
Do three things and skip the fourth. Photograph it with a flashlight or phone torch held low and close to the floor so the defect casts a shadow, because a photo taken from standing height under a ceiling light shows nothing. Put a coin or a tape measure beside it for scale. Note the date you first saw it. And do not scrub, pick or scrape at it, because a blister that has been opened is harder to diagnose and easier to argue about.
Timing helps you. Reporting in the first couple of weeks makes the cause obvious, while a call eighteen months later invites a genuine question about whether something happened in between. The conditions on this page are also early warnings worth taking seriously rather than cosmetic annoyances: clustered blisters and craters are how a coating failure announces itself before it spreads. Homeowners in this corridor can read garage floor coating in Kenosha, or run an estimate and ask how our final inspection is handled.