Garage Floor Coating
in Northville, MI.

The City of Northville is one of the oldest housing stocks in the region. Census figures show roughly a quarter of the city's homes were built before 1940, and the Northville Historic District — listed on the National Register in 1972 and roughly bounded by Cady, Rogers, and Randolph Streets — is built around houses from the 1860s and 1870s in Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, and Queen Anne styles. The city's 2019 historic district survey counted 425 resources, and many of those properties have a detached garage set behind the house rather than an attached one.

Northville Township is the opposite story. The township's median home was built around 1990, and more than 40% of its homes went up between 1990 and 2009. The older township subdivisions — Northville Commons and Northville Colony Estates between Five and Six Mile, the Lakes of Northville between Six and Seven Mile off Haggerty — date from the 1970s and '80s with two-car garages and full basements. Further west, Ravines of Northville off Six Mile, Stonewater between Beck and Ridge, and Steeplechase between Ridge and Napier are late-1990s and 2000s builds, most with three-car garages and plenty with walkout basements.

Those eras fail differently. An old detached-garage slab in the city has been through a century of freeze-thaw — heaving, cracking, pitting at the apron, and patches on top of patches. A 2000s township slab usually looks fine but was finished with a builder-grade broom texture and never sealed, so it dusts, stains, and soaks up salt from its first winter. We prep each one for what it actually is, and a three-car garage plus a walkout basement is just as much at home in our process as a single-bay garage off an alley.