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When deciding on your garage floor, you may want to consider garage floor paint. Using garage floor paint, it’s easy to put a nice, shiny coat on your garage floor, making it easier to clean and also more attractive. If the garage floor has already been coated and that coating has either worn off or is now undesirable for whatever reason, than paint can be a good option for your garage floor. Most of these garage floor paints can be used to top other sealants or paints, providing they are clean and free of any contaminants. As garage floor paint is fairly thick, there’s usually no need for color matching or anything of the sort.

How Long Does It Take?

Some garage floor paint kits can take as little as three hours to apply, and this includes the time it takes to prepare the current flooring. It’s a very permanent solution that only takes about as long as the less permanent garage floors such as mats or tiling. This is, of course, only for the average garage. A larger garage will take longer.

Testing Your Concrete Garage Floor

Your concrete has to be prepared as per the garage floor paint manufacturers directions before the paint can be laid down successfully. This is true even if your garage floor is brand new and has never had anything at all placed on it. If the cement is not prepared correctly, you risk the paint not adhering and providing you with its long life and great finish.

The Mandatory 30 Day Wait

If the concrete is new, there is another set of conditions that must be observed. You can generally tell if concrete is new by the color; if it’s very dark, then it’s new, even if you can’t carve your initials into it. Most garage floor paint kit manufacturers want at least thirty days from the time it was laid before you put down their paint, though that will vary, so you’ll want to check your manual. If you’re not sure, try to get in touch with the contractor that laid the floor. If that’s not an option, you could always wait thirty days from the time you first saw the garage floor, just to be sure. It will have to be prepped and cleaned no matter what is on it, even if it looks like there’s nothing, so there’s no harm is using it for storage or cars until the thirty days has passed.

Garage Floor Paint: The Best Option?

Garage floor paint can be time consuming and difficult, but the rewards are great. When done correctly, it’s very shiny and pretty and will last a long time.

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

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.