Miami’s Bowling Alley Epoxy Flooring
We coat the floors people walk on in a bowling center: the concourse, the settee areas, the bar and grill, the shoe counter and the arcade. The lanes belong to your lane contractor. Firefighter owned, based in Miami, working Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and the Keys.
What the Floor Around the Lanes Puts Up With
Rental Shoes
Pair after pair of slick-soled bowling shoes cross the concourse all night. Grit or a sticky spot on that path rides the sole onto the approach, and that’s how a bowler sticks at the line.
Spilled Drinks
Beer, soda and slushies get set on the floor, kicked over and walked through. Sugar left overnight on worn concrete stains it and turns tacky.
Behind the Pins
The machine area behind the pinsetters gets lane oil, grease and parts on the floor. It wants a chemical-resistant coat and a texture a mechanic can stand on.
Arcade and Party Rooms
Sneakers, dropped pizza and game cabinets rolled in and out. That’s a scratch and impact problem more than a chemical one.
How a Bowling Center Gets Phased
Walk the Building
Zach walks the concourse, bar, kitchen and machine area with you, tests the slab for moisture, and asks when your league nights and slow nights fall.
A Spec for Each Zone
One written proposal names the system for each part of the building, the products, the order we’ll work in and a fixed price.
Grind and Repair
We diamond grind the concrete open, fill cracks and old anchor holes, and run dust control so nothing settles on the lanes or the machines.
Coat in Sections
One barricaded section at a time, coated while you’re closed or slow, so the lanes keep running while the floor beside them cures.
The Lanes Stay Off Our List
A bowling lane is not an epoxy floor. Lanes and approaches are wood or synthetic lane surfaces, built, resurfaced and oiled by lane people, and we don’t coat them, sand them or set anything on them. What we do is protect them while we work: plastic and tape at the approaches, dust collection on every grinder, and no crew traffic past the settees. If somebody offers to epoxy your lanes, talk to a lane contractor before you sign anything.
Everything else in the building is concrete, usually hiding under worn carpet, old tile or a painted finish that gave up years ago. That’s the floor we take care of, from the front door to the back hallway.
Concourse and Settee Floors
The concourse is the floor that sells the center. It’s the first thing a birthday party sees and the path every bowler takes to the shoe counter and back. Bowling shoes are built with slick soles so a bowler can slide at the line, which means texture matters more here than in most buildings. Too smooth and a spilled drink puts somebody on the ground. Too rough and it chews up rental soles and holds grime the mop can’t reach.
Our usual answer is a broadcast flake floor over 100% solids epoxy with a fine slip-resistant additive in the topcoat: enough grip for a wet spot, smooth enough that a mop slides. The settee areas get the same system so there’s no transition strip to catch a toe. Flake also hides the scuffs a busy concourse picks up between cleanings, and a solid color won’t. Game rooms get their own look at it on our arcade epoxy page.
Bar, Grill and Rental Shoe Counter
The floor behind the bar takes beer, mixers and ice dumped out of cups, with staff standing on it all shift. A quartz broadcast system gives that floor real grip and holds up to the sanitizer and mop water it sees every night.
The grill is a separate job. Fryer grease, hot water and steam call for urethane cement, which handles heat and temperature swings better than standard epoxy, coved up the wall so nothing collects at the base. More on that system on our urethane cement page. The shoe counter is small and tough on a floor. The strip in front of it takes more pivoting feet than anywhere else in the center, plus shoe spray and carts of returned pairs, so we build that lane heavier.
Testing the Slab Before a Drop of Coating
Plenty of South Florida centers sit on a slab on grade that has spent years under carpet or tile. We pull what’s on top, remove every bit of carpet glue and thinset, and grind the concrete to an open profile. Coating over old adhesive is how floors peel.
Then we test for moisture vapor. Slabs here push moisture up all year, and a coating laid over a wet slab can blister and lift no matter how good the product is. When the readings call for it, a moisture-mitigating primer goes down first. Where the entry has big glass, we finish with an aliphatic topcoat like polyaspartic so the sun doesn’t yellow the floor. Our materials come from ChemTek, Smith’s Paints and Floor Guard.
Working Around Leagues and Parties
A center can’t close for a week, and nobody’s asking it to. We map the job in sections and start where it hurts least, usually the back hallway and machine area, then the bar, then the concourse in pieces. Each section is barricaded and coated while the building is closed or slow, and it stays roped off until it has cured enough for traffic.
League nights and booked parties go on the calendar first and we plan around them. Before we start, you’ll have it in writing which areas are down on which days, so the front desk can tell bowlers where to walk.
Cleaning Between League Nights
Your staff mops the concourse every night, so the floor has to survive the routine. Use a neutral cleaner and a soft pad. Strong degreasers and solvent cleaners used nightly will dull a topcoat long before shoes do. Get sugary spills up the same night. Behind the pins, keep lane oil from tracking into the hallway, because oil on a walkway is a slip hazard and works on the coating over time. Walk-off mats at the doors keep parking lot sand out.
There’s no waxing or stripping. If the lane in front of the shoe counter starts to dull down the road, we can recoat that section without touching the rest. Every floor carries our 5-year warranty on materials and installation.
What Center Owners Want Answered
The questions that come up every time we walk a bowling center.
Can you put epoxy on the lanes or the approaches?
Will the floor be slippery in bowling shoes?
Do we have to close the center?
What goes down in the grill kitchen?
Can you coat over our old carpet glue or tile?
How should staff clean the concourse?
What does the warranty cover?
Read It From Them
“They did a beautiful professional job on my floor I would highly recommend to any one to use this company. They’re very clean, neat and professional.”
“The best. On schedule. So kind. Simply can’t ask for anything better. 10/10 service”
Let’s Walk the Concourse
Call Zach or send a few photos of the concourse, the bar and the back hallway. We’ll pick a quiet hour to walk the building, in English or Spanish.