Waiting weeks for a crown or bridge, wearing a temporary that feels wrong and looks worse, is a familiar frustration for anyone who has needed a dental restoration. If you have ever wondered why that process takes so long, the answer often comes down to whether your dentist sends work to a third-party lab or handles it under one roof.
At Floss & Co., we built an in-house lab specifically to close that gap. Because our team designs and produces restorations on site, we can move a patient from a digital scan to a finished piece without the back-and-forth delays of shipping impressions across town or across the country. Before we start any treatment, we explain what the process actually looks like, from the first scan in the chair to the moment your new restoration is placed.
Starting With a Digital Scan, Not a Goopy Impression
The process begins the moment you sit in the chair. Instead of biting down on a tray of thick, uncomfortable impression material, we use a digital scanner to capture a precise 3D image of your teeth in minutes.
This step matters more than it might seem. A digital scan eliminates the mess and gag reflex of traditional impressions and gives our team an exact, high-resolution model to work from immediately. No need to pour a plaster cast or wait for material to set, so we can move straight into designing your restoration the same day.
From Scan to Digital Design
Once we have your scan, our lab technicians use it to design your restoration, whether it is a crown, a bridge, or a dental implant component, on a computer screen rather than by hand. This digital design stage lets our team map your bite, surrounding teeth, and the exact shape needed for a comfortable, natural fit before we cut or mill any material.
Because we design in-house, our doctors and lab technicians can collaborate on real-time adjustments. If something needs to shift slightly to improve your bite or the look of your smile, we can discuss it down the hall instead of emailing an outside lab days later.
Milling and Finishing Your Restoration
Once the design is finalized, the file moves to milling, where we shape your restoration from a solid block of ceramic or other dental material. Because we oversee this step ourselves, we control the timeline instead of waiting on an external facility’s shipping schedule.
After milling, your restoration goes through hand finishing. Technicians check the fit, adjust the shape, and polish the surface so it blends naturally with your existing teeth. This final quality check happens before you ever sit back down in the chair, which helps reduce the number of follow-up visits needed to get things exactly right.
Why an In-House Lab Changes the Timeline
An in-house dental lab does more than speed things up. It gives our team direct control over quality at every stage, since nothing about your restoration passes through a third party we cannot personally check in on. Digital workflows like ours are also part of a broader shift in restorative dentistry, one where scanners digitize spatial data by capturing tooth preparation, surrounding tissue, and occlusion, either directly in the mouth or by scanning a model, replacing older, slower methods of building restorations by hand.
For patients, the practical benefit is fewer appointments and less time spent with a temporary. In many cases, same-day scans and same-day crowns are possible because the design and production steps that used to require outside coordination now happen under our own roof.
The same process supports more complex restorative work as well. Patients considering single-tooth implants or guided implant surgery benefit from the same digital precision, as we can design and adjust the components with the same accuracy as a single crown.
Get Started With the In-House Lab at Floss & Co.
If you are due for a restoration or curious whether your case fits our in-house lab process, we would rather walk you through your options directly than have you guess based on how a friend’s treatment went years ago. Every mouth is different, and our team can review your specific situation, from a single filling to a full restoration plan, and explain exactly what your timeline would look like with our process.
We built this lab because we wanted more say over the quality and speed of the care we provide, and we think that shows in the finished result. If you would like to see how our in-house lab process could work for your smile, reach out to us, and our team will help you find a time to come in.