Reasons to stop before you buy the material

The slab fails, or has not run, a quantified moisture test

Do not rely on a dry taped-plastic sheet: the federal painting specification, UFGS 09 90 00 (paragraph 3.6.1 d), keeps that method for walls and judges a floor by a quantified emission test instead.

If your product's warranty excludes delamination caused by slab moisture, proceeding without a passing quantified reading leaves that risk with whoever owns the floor. Run the moisture verdict tool before buying anything.

The slab has not finished curing

UFGS 09 90 00 (paragraph 3.6.1 a) requires concrete slab on grade to cure at least 90 days before painting, against 30 days for concrete, stucco and masonry in general. The specification gives no reason; ours is that a slab on grade can only dry upward, through the surface about to be sealed. A slab poured in the last three months has not reached that 90-day minimum; treat it as not ready unless the product's data sheet allows coating sooner and a quantified moisture test passes.

The slab is cracked in a way that keeps moving, or is heaving

A coating bridges a static crack; it does not stop an active one from reopening, and a floor that is heaving from frost, expansive soil, or a failing sub-base will crack the coating along with the concrete underneath it. The crack and spall takeoff derives the repair material for a crack that has stopped moving. A crack that is still moving is a structural question for an engineer, not a coating question.

There is an existing coating or sealer and nobody knows what it is

Compatibility between resin chemistries is product-specific, and the wrong combination can mean the new coating fails to bond, or bonds and then lifts the old layer wholesale. The surface preparation page treats any existing paint or coating as something that has to come off before profiling starts: it adds two removal passes and rules out acid etching. If nobody knows what the coating is, plan on removing it completely rather than gambling on compatibility.

The space cannot actually be out of service for the real cure schedule

A crew does not make resin cure faster; what more hands change is how much of the elapsed time one person has to personally spend on the slab. The cure schedule page derives the real elapsed hours from a data sheet and the slab's actual surface temperature, using this site's own rule of thumb — an assumption, listed on the methodology page — that cure time roughly doubles with each 18 degrees Fahrenheit the slab runs below the sheet's reference temperature. A single working garage or a commercial floor with no second bay to shift traffic onto needs that number before a start date, not after one.

The all-in comparison already says the quote is cheaper

The DIY-versus-pro comparison separates cash outlay from the value of your own time and from the cost of a failed first attempt. Where that all-in comparison is already negative before any failure risk is added, doing it yourself is not the frugal option — it is a more expensive option that happens to defer the cost to a weekend instead of an invoice.

One more: do not pick the finish before the floor earns it

A quartz or metallic system orders more material than a solid-colour build — several times as much for quartz — and nothing about that spend improves a floor that fails the moisture test, is still curing, or is cracked and moving. Decide the finish after the floor has passed the six conditions above, not before: an expensive system poured over a floor that should not be coated yet fails exactly the same way a cheap one does, and more material is lost with it.

And one that is genuinely outside this site: a chemical list the build spec was not sized to certify

The build spec on this site still adds film for its harshest chemical-exposure band — solvents or process chemistry — so the takeoff has a number to work with, but it warns that the number is not a resistance rating: resistance to a specific solvent or acid is a property of a specific resin chemistry, and no planning tool, including this one, can certify it generically.

If the floor is going to see anything closer to a process chemical list than a car's own fluids — a workshop, a lab, a commercial kitchen with concentrated cleaning agents — stop before the takeoff page and take the actual chemical list to the coating manufacturer, who tests resistance against the chemistry you give them.