So when we bought our house back in January we had a...well..."interesting" garage situation. The garage was previously used as some sort of living quarters...we're talking full wall to wall carpet and nicely painted walls that match the interior of the house. That's all well and good but...my husband is a mechanic and wants to do mechanic-y things in the garage. And thus lead to our purchase of this:
We got it at Home Depot for somewhere around $100. We also bought it in the dead of winter...after reading the instructions we realized this project was going to have to wait until we had MUCH warmer weather...the concrete in your garage has to be something like 60 degrees before you paint.
Steve took over the wonderful job of removing the carpeting from the garage and many months later, I set out to apply the epoxy. We were left with a bunch of nail holes in the concrete from pulling out the carpet. Before painting, I went through and filled all of them in with concrete crack filler.
(There were A LOT of holes...it was like this around the perimeter of the garage...not a pleasant experience)
I went through and filled all the holes like so...I just squeezed some filler in the holes then went over it with a putty knife to smooth it out. I then let it dry for 24 hours (as according to the directions).
We don't have a ton of stuff in our garage, but enough that I was not willing to leave it in my driveway for at least 24 hours while the flooring sealed, so I moved everything to one side of the garage and set to work.
The first step is to use the etching salt. You'll need to drag your hose into your garage for this step and have a watering can handy. First you need to wet your floor. Then, you mix the salt and 2 gallons of water together in the watering can and then pour it on your floor in about a 4x4 foot section at a time and scrub away with a brush. We had a sturdy bristle broom that I used but they say a wire bristle brush would be best.
(I was not about to go out and spend money on one)
After you're done scrubbing each section, rinse it off and move on to the next until you've done the whole area you're going to paint. My garage took a couple hours to dry completely, I just left the garage cracked and ran a couple errands in the mean time.
The epoxy comes in a two part system. You have to mix the two parts together...I mixed mine in a 5 gallon bucket because I wasn't sure there was enough room in one of the paint cans for both parts. You only have about an hour or so to work before the epoxy starts to cure so make sure you have all your painting materials ready before you mix the paints! I went around and cut in with an angled brush (I LOVE the Wooster ShortCut) and then started painting using a roller attached to a pole.
I painted a 3 to 4 square foot section at a time and then threw down the paint chips that come with the kit. They're completely optional but we decided to go for it. I poured them out of the bag into a bowl so I could grab handfuls easier. You pretty much just throw them up above the painted area and the spread out nicely as they fall down. I repeated this process until I had covered the whole area. Here you can see what the paint chips look like...next to my feet for scale!
I did the other half of the garage a few days later and then let it dry overnight before I started putting things away.
(We also painted the door from the garage into the house black when we moved in. Steve anticipated having greasy and dirty hands and didn't want to mess up our white door, so we painted it!)
I'm also pretty happy with the new use for the pallet that Steve's toolbox came on. It keeps everything corralled an prevents stuff from falling over.
The next step is to get some more hanging storage and get a workbench so we can clear up some more space and have a place to put all the random odds and ends!
The epoxy will be nice for Steve to work on because it prevents any oils from soaking into the concrete, you can pretty much just wipe it up. The whole process was easy, but time consuming. The only thing that was a pain was the clean up. I had to make sure to really rinse my paintbrush and roller out well so that they wouldn't harden from the epoxy. The kit come with a how-to instruction video that is helpful too!
(though it is absolutely hilarious how much the woman in it seems to be loving throwing the paint chips...you should probably watch it just for a laugh)
I would definitely recommend this product...we used Rustoleum when we did our kitchen cabinets and that company totally came through for us again with the garage epoxy!
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