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.
Tough Epoxy Garage Flooring
Extremely tough, epoxy is a very long-lasting coating that is painted onto concrete. Different than normal paint, epoxy will resist grease, oils, and many other things that ruin or plain out dissolve ordinary paints. Regular paint wouldn’t be able to handle things like motor oils since they’re mostly oil based themselves, which means you need a special type of paint, such as epoxy. This is because when two oil based substances mix, they naturally attempt to combine with each other. This effect causes motor oil and paint to basically be mutually self destructive. Parts cleaner, grease, fuel, power steering fluid, brake fluid…all are petroleum based, and all have the same effect on petroleum based paints. It’s actually pretty interesting if you start thinking of just how petroleum based most of our lives’ are. That’s what’s great about epoxy based paints, though. Since they’re resin based, they’re not susceptible to damage from oil and oil based substances.
Old Epoxy Garage Floors That Shine
Old garage floors like to shine, too! Just because the garage floor has some age on it doesn’t mean it can’t be pretty. I know, pretty and garage floor typically don’t go together, but they do when there’s an epoxy coating involved. Epoxy is able to last so long because it grips the concrete on a microscopic level and actually seeps down into the cracks, as opposed to other garage floor solutions that just kind of float on the top layer, be it dust, dirt, or concrete. Cleaning an epoxy coated garage floor is simple – generally just power wash it. This is because it doesn’t absorb all those chemicals, and therefore doesn’t stain. Most chemicals will simply float on top of the epoxy coating, making it just a matter of wiping them up or pushing them out. Be careful though that you don’t accidentally poison the earth around your garage. You’re probably used to picking up chemicals with some sort of absorbent and throwing them in the garbage. Just because the chemicals no longer hurt your garage floor doesn’t mean they won’t hurt the environment, especially groundwater.
Colorful Epoxy Garage Floor Coatings
When you think of epoxy coatings, if you have any picture in your head at all, it’s probably of a shiny gray floor. It’s an awesome color of gray, really it is, but it’s still gray. Not that you won’t see a huge improvement over the gray of your concrete garage floor, because you will, but some people would much prefer to have some sort of color there instead. For those people, there are various colors of epoxy kits. The only problem is, they’re often nearly impossible to find locally. Some hardware stores have been known to tell customers point blank that there is no such thing as colored epoxy kits, which is a blatant lie. Lots of people end up turning to the net to buy their garage floor coating kits, and many times this solution is cheaper than the hardware store anyway. Although buying things online can sometimes be a problem when you need to return something, I don’t think that problem would really exist for a garage floor kit.
Concrete Garage Floor No Want Epoxy!
To answer that question, you will have to do some investigating. As opposed to any other type of garage floor, Epoxy does take some preparing. Even after being prepared, though, some concrete just can’t handle an epoxy coating, for various reasons. If your concrete can take a coating, however, there’s still the matter of cleaning and etching it, which is quite tedious and very labor intensive. For those of us that aren’t in the best of shape, laying an epoxy garage floor may not be an option. There are other, simpler types of garage floors that aren’t nearly as time sensitive, such as garage floor tiles that you can stop and come back to whenever you like. There’s also smaller garage floor mats that can be moved around the garage to wherever you need them. That may be all you need. But, if your body or bank account can handle either installing or having someone install an epoxy garage floor coating, it sure would look a lot nicer, wouldn’t it?
Eppie likes to write articles about her garage floors and epoxy garage floor coating.