The old floor is gone before the next trade shows up.

Here is what the last day looks like. The plastic comes down. The debris is already on the truck, not stacked by your back door waiting on somebody else to come and collect it. The slab is swept. What you walk into is a bare floor the next trade can start on — not a room somebody has to clean out first before any work can happen in it.

That is the outcome. Here is how it is held to: plastic seals the work zone before a single tool runs, and the air returns get covered so your HVAC is not quietly pumping concrete dust into the suites down the hall. Grinding and shot blasting run to vacuum.

Covering the returns is the part that matters most, and it is the part that gets skipped. An uncovered return turns the building's own air handling into a delivery system: it lifts concrete dust off our floor and puts it through the ductwork into rooms nobody is working in — into the vents, the equipment and whatever is sitting on the desks.

Here is the part nobody tells you: dust cleanup beyond the work zone is not included unless it is quoted. If you want the neighbouring space wiped down too, say so at the walkthrough and it goes on the number. What we will not do is imply it is free and then argue about it on the last day.

The whole point of the job is a slab the installer can work on, so tearing up the thing underneath defeats it. Hand tools go where a machine would gouge. Door frames, jambs, thresholds and transitions get protected or pulled on purpose — not knocked out and dealt with later.

If something under that floor is already cracked, spalled, rotten or wet, you hear about it the same day with a photo. Not at the end. Not on the invoice. On a wood subfloor we tell you before we start what the tear-out is likely to expose, because glue-down over old plank almost always exposes something.

A photo on the day it is found is what settles that argument before it starts. Nobody has to take anybody's word for what the slab looked like under the tile, because you saw it the same afternoon we did.

No. The number does not move unless you change the scope in writing. Not because we found a second layer of glue. Not because the mastic was worse than it looked. Not because the tile had a mud bed under it.

That is exactly why Ricky walks the job before he prices it. A number written off a photo or a phone call is a guess, and a guess is what gets re-priced halfway through the week. He looks at it first so the number holds.

Old vinyl tile and black cutback mastic can contain asbestos. In a building that went up before the 1980s that is a live possibility rather than a technicality — and it is exactly the material we get called about.

The test is the customer's to arrange and the customer's to pay for. It is not in our number.

Ricky. The owner. The man who walked your floor and wrote your number is the man standing in your building when it comes up — not a salesman who quoted it and disappeared, and not a name on the paperwork you never hear from again once the job is booked.

He answers the phone himself as well. Not a call centre, not an answering service, not somebody who takes a message and passes it along.

On site within two business days of that call. The written number the same day he walks it. And generally, no money up front — it depends on the job, but the normal case is that you are not paying anything before the work starts.

Those dates are on this page because they are the ones people get let down on. A contractor who will not put a date next to the walkthrough is telling you something.

He comes back and fixes it.

You call the same number you called the first time and you get the same man — the one who priced the job and ran it. Not a claims process, not a different office, not somebody who has to be told from the start what the work was.

The debris leaves with us. Haul-off is in the number, not a second contract with an outfit you have to chase down after we have gone.

The slab gets swept. That is the finish line we work to — a slab the next trade can start on, not a floor with the covering off and the pile still sitting in the middle of it.

Where "clean" stops is at the containment. Past that line it is quoted work or it is not our work, and you find that out at the walkthrough rather than on the last afternoon.