New Garage Floor

After nearly 30 years of living in our home, Bev had decided she wanted to put an epoxy coating on our garage floor and I had to agree.  The main drawback is that everything had to be moved out before the installers showed up and like many others that was to be a big challenge for us as we had the walls lined with stuff sitting on the floor.  We also had three cabinets that rested on the floor.

To deal with the random stuff sitting on the floor, I bought two 48” wide cabinets from Seville Classics via Sam's and to make the cabinets easy to move I put wheels under them.

Here is everything ready to roll out before the installers get here, which also includes a fridge which was mostly emptied by moving the contents to the RV – it can be very convenient to have a spare house sitting in the driveway.

I wish I had taken some garage before-shots but I would likely have been too embarrassed to post them, but we could put both cars in the garage so it wasn’t too bad.

Here is a shot with everything removed and ready for the install.

Fortunately, the weather was dry and I could just leave everything in the driveway for four days.

The installation process begins with grinding off the top surface of the concrete using a machine with diamond impregnated teeth to remove any contaminants and open the pores of the concrete to gripe the first coating.  They brought their own generator for power and had all of the dust generating equipment connected to vacuums.  Below is the grinder, the floor after grinding and after vacuuming.

Next, they vacuumed all of the dust and using a squeegee and roller they put down a coat of epoxy. 

This was followed by the color chips which were spread on the wet epoxy by hand from buckets and reminded me of throwing out grass seed or feed for chickens.

To allow them to walk on the wet epoxy they wore shoes with spikes used for aerating lawns, which I thought was very clever.

This ended the first day and it was allowed to dry overnight.

The first day they had used the wrong address to get here and ended up an hour and a half away in Sevier County so they didn’t get here until 11:30am.  The second day they took the more direct route and showed up around 10am and began by using a leaf blower to get up the excess color flakes which they reuse.

Next, they went over the floor with a floor scraper to be sure it was smooth – no paint flakes standing on their edge, etc, then they vacuumed up any remaining chip pieces.  I was amazed at all of the little details that went into getting everything just right for the final coating.

The final step was to roll on a coat of polyaspartic clear topcoat which makes the floor antibacterial, antimicrobial, UV stable and non-porous. Polyaspartic is similar to epoxy but it is more durable, and won't chip, scratch or scuff – sounds perfect for a garage floor.

So Bev went to Florida for three weeks leaving the dirty ole concrete garage floor above  and came home to this for her Christmas present and I'm guessing she is giving me the same thing - at our age we don't need anything personal.

In case you are wondering it cost $6/sq.ft. for less than 600 sq.ft and $5.50/ sq.ft. for over 600 sq. ft.  It would be nice to do the downstairs garage but it would take a month just to move everything out.

Photos can be enlarged by clicking on them and the blue words are links.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

12/13 & 12/14/21 event dates