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If you’d like to know what it would be like to drive onto your own personal auto showroom floor, you may want to give thought to an epoxy garage floor. This type of floor is not only durable, but it’s also very shiny. Imagine seeing your own car in the floor’s reflection, be it either a brand new car or your old ’76 beater that’s seen better days. An epoxy garage floor coating is viewed as the best in garage flooring to many, and for very good reason. Epoxy garage floors last a very long time, often as long as the concrete itself, though you will have to sacrifice quite a lot of time, and there is a bit of difficulty. Every once in a while the garage floor paint will have to be refreshed with a new coat, but other than that, the initial install covers most of the work. Epoxy will not move or crumple under car tires, which is a problem with some other garage floor coverings.

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 Shiny Epoxy Garage Floors

Just because your garage floor is old doesn’t mean it can’t be nice and shiny. Epoxy coating lasts for years, sometimes decades, and can be cleaned off and made to look new just like concrete, only without the staining since it doesn’t absorb chemicals like concrete does. It lasts so long because it bonds with the concrete at the microscopic level, as opposed other types of garage floors that either sit on top or stick to the first thing they come in contact with, be it dirt, dust, or whatever. Cleaning is generally just a matter of power washing, if that, since most chemicals will simply sit on top of the epoxy garage floor. Be careful that you don’t poison the ground around your garage with chemicals though, since you’re probably used to absorbing them with kitty litter or something and throwing them in the trash. Just because it doesn’t do any damage to the floor of your garage doesn’t mean it won’t hurt the earth.

Rainbow Of 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.

The Great Concrete Garage Floor War: Will Epoxy Win?

Maybe. Well, probably. Epoxy does require a lot of preparing, as opposed to just about any other type of garage floor. Some concrete, though, simply can’t take a good epoxy coating. Even should your concrete be determined to be in good enough condition to accept a coating, it will have to be cleaned and etched, which is extremely tedious and labor intensive. There’s really no method of applying an epoxy garage floor that is for the faint of heart, or faint of back, for that matter. If you’re like me, and aren’t exactly in the best of shape, you may want to consider something a bit less intensive. Garage floor tiles, for instance, can be started and finished pretty much whenever you like, without regard to time limits and setting times. Small garage floor mats can be moved about when you need to, so sometimes they’re all you need. However, if your body or bank account are up to the task, an epoxy garage floor coating just might be for you.

Eppie likes to write articles about her garage floor coating and other garage floor coatings.

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