Pulling onto your own garage floor is like driving onto a auto showroom floor if you lay down a shiny, durable epoxy garage floor. All of the magic of seeing your own car in the reflection on the floor…whether you own an old ‘76 Buick that’s seen better days or a brand new car that tries to outshine the floor. To many, an epoxy garage floor coating is seen as the ultimate in garage flooring, and for good reason. Although extremely time consuming and somewhat difficult to install, epoxy garage floors last a very long time, often as long as the concrete itself. Sometimes a refreshing of the garage floor paint is in order, but generally the initial install is the most work that will need to be done. As opposed to other garage floor coverings, epoxy cannot move or crumple under car tires, and will stay put if you decide to spray it off.
Durable Epoxy Garage Flooring
Epoxy is an extremely tough, very long-lasting coating that is painted on concrete. It’s different than normal paint, though, in that it will resist oils, grease, and lots of other things that would dissolve and ruin ordinary paints. This is why it’s suitable for garage floors, as regular paint would obviously not be able to handle such things as motor oils since most regular paints are oil based. When two oil based substances come in contact with each other, they’ll try to coalesce which, in the case of motor oil and paint, would destroy both. Grease would have the same effect as it is also oil based, as would any break fluid, power steering fluid, parts cleaner…the list goes on and on. It’s amazing just how petroleum based our lives and products actually are. That’s the beauty of epoxy based paints, however. Their resin base keeps them from being susceptible to the damages of oil and oil based substances.
Old Shiny Epoxy Garage Floors
Of all the different types of garage flooring, the epoxy garage floor is unique in that it bonds with the concrete at a microscopic level. This means that once the epoxy coating is years, sometimes decades old, it can still be cleaned just like the concrete by itself. The difference is that it doesn’t stain since it doesn’t absorb the oil based chemicals that are so often found in garages. Since it doesn’t stain, it’s usually just a matter of power washing the garage floor, if that. Most chemicals will just sit on top of an epoxy coating and can be cleaned up with either a towel, or possibly pushed out of the garage with a squeegee or broom. Be careful, though, that you don’t contaminate the earth around your garage with chemicals that, before, you would’ve absorbed with kitty litter or the like and thrown in the trash. Just because it doesn’t damage your garage floor doesn’t mean it won’t damage the environment, and everything that hits your soil will eventually end up in the groundwater – that’s drinking water.
Colorful Epoxy Garage Floor Coatings
Epoxy coatings usually come in gray. It’s a very shiny, very attractive gray, but it’s still very gray. Now just because it’s gray doesn’t mean you’re not going to notice a marked improvement over your cement garage floor, because you certainly will. However, lots of people would rather add some sort of color, and it is possible. Unfortunately, many times your local hardware store won’t have anything but gray epoxy coatings. In fact, it’s not uncommon for these hardware stores to tell you there’s no such thing as colored epoxy, that it’s all gray, which is simply not true. Sometimes it does take some looking, but epoxy garage floor coating kits are in good supply on the web, and usually a lot cheaper than the hardware store. Odds are pretty good that, compared to other things, you’d have no reason to return a garage floor kit, and the ability to return things is my biggest worry when it comes to buying on the net.
Concrete Garage Floor No Want Epoxy!
As opposed to pretty much every other type of garage floor, epoxy does require quite a lot of preparation. In the end, some concrete just won’t be able to take a solid epoxy coating. Even if the concrete is determined to be in good enough shape for coating, it has to be cleaned and etched which is usually very labor intensive and tedious. There really is no part of laying an epoxy garage floor that is for the faint of heart…or maybe I should say faint of back. Those of us who aren’t in the best shape physically may want to opt for something less time sensitive, like garage floor tiles that you can finish whenever you feel like and not have to worry about them setting in the correct order, or garage floor mats that can be moved around to where they’re needed. However, if bank account is up to paying someone to do the job, or if your body is up to doing it yourself, an epoxy garage floor coating is definitely the way to go.
Eppie likes to write articles about her garage floor coating and other garage floor coatings.
Tags: automotive, Cars, concrete, DIY, flooring, garage, outdoors, painting, shopping
Leave a reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.