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If your home features a concrete floor like a garage, you may have found out the hard way that the material, though renowned for its durability, is not immune to damage.
Looking at a chipped or cracked concrete floor every day isn’t fun, but that doesn’t mean the solution is to rip it out and install a new one. That’s expensive, bad for the environment, and only a temporary solution, should the problem occur again.
A big trend in home design these days is to use every bit of space in the home to the fullest and to shine a light on otherwise ignored spaces. Garage floors are seeing a major increase in interest, especially now that concrete flooring has come such a long way.
A good sign of that is that a lot of different epoxy garage floor kits are available today.
Concrete floors at garage are seen as worth decorating these days
Concrete floors also need not be boring these days. The usual boring gray is out, polished high colored garage floors, and beautiful designs are in. If you browse the internet and social media you will see many amazing epoxy floorings being done.
So how do you go from boring gray to a work of art? With different colors of coatings and acrylic paint chips etc. Heavy-duty coatings consisting of epoxy-based ingredients or epoxy floors alternative help to seal in new designs as well as reduce wear and tear.
The best thing is, these coatings can even make messy spills easier to clean. What’s even better than that, these special coatings will have your floors looking beautiful for years to come with very little maintenance.
If you think of it from an investment point of angle, what says wealth more than a beautifully decked-out garage for your cars? The neighbors don’t need to know your secret that concrete only costs a fraction of what materials like stone and tile would.
Hide flaws and protect the floor
So we opened the styling options a bit before. Epoxy is usually a glossy coating that will show the surface unperfections easily. To avoid that, there are two options. Make a perfect level floor or use distraction to eyes in the coating.
For the latter, the garage floor finish can be further enhanced by acrylic paint chips and quartz, which add that “flecked” look and come in nearly any color you can dream up. Royal blue to bright yellow to dark red and beyond, the color options to match your tastes are endless.
This is a great way to hide flaws in an older concrete floor that is getting a makeover. The paint chips or quartz help smooth over any garage flooring imperfections.
If you want a multicolor epoxy coating like in the most liked social media pictures, you need to work on the floor a bit. It should be free of cracks and holes and a level surface. The next section will be more about that.
Extend your living space out into the garage. You can have a well-light elegant space to keep your vehicles, toolboxes, and other items rather than that boring and drab space that screams the 90s. When it comes to a complete home makeover, you can’t ignore your flooring in any room of the house. Good concrete coatings can really hike up that pizzazz factor in your garage.
Use epoxy for concrete repair
Epoxy is ideal for concrete repair, first and foremost, because it’s so much more affordable than the alternative of tearing it out and starting over. It’s also more affordable, though, because it virtually guarantees the problem will never happen again.
The last thing you want is to pay for more concrete only to end up doing so all over again down the road. That being said, before applying the epoxy coating, the faults have to be fixed in the old concrete.
I have a few guides here for fixing concrete, one for cracks is over here. It’s important to fix cracks and holes well and leave the surface as level as possible. This way they won’t show under the epoxy or come off. With the faults fixed, your floor can last a really long time without maintenance.
There are a few factors that may have led to your concrete giving in. First, it could have suffered a serious impact. It could also be that years of foot traffic and heavy vehicles going back and forth over it finally took their toll. There are also chemicals that might have done their own part.
However, what you might not realize is that even simple moisture can eventually work its way into concrete and cause it to split open. Moisture and cold are some of the worst combinations as the water gets into cracks, freezes, and widens them and this can repeat many times as the temperatures change. Combined with salt it’s more serious.
Epoxy solves all these problems from the surface. For one thing, it is extremely durable and impact-resistant. It is also resistant to chemicals and that’s one of the main reasons you see these floors a lot in car shops and such. Chances are your home won’t be supplying anywhere near the same amount of wear and tear either.
However, epoxy also provides an impenetrable seal, meaning moisture stays on the outside. This is also good news if any aforementioned chemicals were to spill out.
If you don’t catch the problem right away, they could damage your concrete. They may also simply leave a nasty stain that makes repairs just as necessary. With epoxy, cleanup is a breeze and your concrete is none the wiser.
Finally, epoxy makes concrete repair fashionable. There are all kinds of ways you can augment the final product so epoxy ends up making your concrete floor look better than ever before. No matter what kind of style you have going on in your home, there’s an epoxy application that can complement it.
Conclusion
Epoxy is a good way to coat the garage floor, if you’re interested here is a guide on how to do the epoxy coating. If you need to repair cracks and such, it might take over a weekend to finish.
If you want to use the garage for something else than storing cars and tools, you might want to check the internet for ideas. There are lots of stylish options and a well-done garage is a good extension of the house. It can be a game room, man cave, gym, hobby room, etc.
For all of these the epoxy concrete floor repair will do the trick as it’s really durable surface that can handle moving of furniture and other equipment.
If your garage floor has a water drain, you might want to check this guide on puddle flanges. It might help you if you need to install some extra waterproof on your old floor drain.
