Painted Garage Floor

We had garage floor epoxy recently installed. I wanted to share some great before and after images along with some tips of how to be sure it’s installed correctly!

I’m on a mission to organize our garage. Why? It’s the first thing I see when I pull into our home. The garage sets my frame of mind. If it’s a hot mess I’m immediately enraged and my head explodes with frustration. If it’s tidy, clean and organized I’m inspired to take that clean state of mind and….walk into a messy kitchen (children, sigh. The gerbil wheel that is life.)

I’m sharing with you the steps I’m taking to organize our garage. I hope it inspires you to clean up your storage space. Organization helps you mentally, and saves you so much time by knowing where things are!

My first step to organize my garage organization was to have a garage floor epoxy floor installed by Granite Garage Floors. Why? The garage is a room, isn’t it? Shouldn’t it have a cleanable floor like wood floors or a rug to vacuum like everything else? Yes, cement is fine. Not knocking that. But in the quest to make this garage function as a part of the house, the floor made a huge difference in laying the groundwork (ba dum bum) for a clean storage workroom.

Eight years ago when we moved into our home, the garage floor was cement. My husband wanted to have it painted, so he hired someone to use DIY store paint epoxy and put some speckles on it to give it a look. Did it look alright? Sure. Did it last? Nope.

Within two weeks it was chipping off, the cement was coming off in huge chunks and it almost immediately looked like a mess. The guy tried to fix it – did that work? Nope, again. Basically, waisted money and time because then the holes looked worse than if we had left it cement.

Here is my garage floor before we started over. Remember, this is what I had paid a lot of money for years ago. It wasn’t cheap, but it was cheaply done. We didn’t know any better to ask the companies if they use the right products. Now we do!

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This time around I hired a company for it to be done the right way.

The company focused heavily on prepping the surface and using the best materials available. This is moi importante for a cement floor to be guaranteed against peeling or hot-tire pick-up.

The whole process to have my garage installed took less than two working days. On the first day they grinded the floor with a diamond floor grinder. Then all dust was vacuumed up.

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Then they poured the garage floor epoxy all over the space. Th epoxy used is low VOC and LEED compliant and manufactured in the United States from several leading polymer suppliers. They pour their secret sauce onto the concrete floor and apply evenly using a squeegee. It looked so pretty being spread around!

Decorative polymer chips were then applied. There are lots of colors to choose from for your garage floor. Get ready to be all designer-y! You can create the look of Granite, Quartz, or Terrazzo.

The final step for garage floor epoxy is to seal the decorative chips into place and create an extremely durable protective clear coat. This also creates an anti-slip grip to floor.

The anti-grip slip is super important. That junk DIY paint made me slip and fall so many times. My kids fell, too if they got out of the car with even slightly damp feed. Not good! Now we no longer slip – in fact just the opposite. There is a nice firm grip to floor.

Once it’s done, let it dry baby, let it dry. You can walk on it with light foot traffic after 24 hours. But don’t pull your cars in for about seven full days.

Granite Garage Floors rocks my world. You can find them in a ton of cities. Ours has been installed for six months and it’s incredible. It looks gorgeous, we’ve had zero issues with it and it’s so cleanable!

We have a beautiful garage now. Stay tuned for future posts to see how I started organizing it! Sign up for my newsletter here.

Here is what my garage floor looks like now. Wow! Yes, you are seeing some new additions to it, too. 🙂

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My garage floor color is Beach Sand.