I am fortunate enough to own three cars. I am also fortunate to have a house with a two car garage. Three cars with a two car garage is a problem that a lot of people would welcome.
It was driving me crazy.
I briefly considered moving, but I really like where I am living. The decision was made; I would build an additional garage onto my two car garage.I will not go into details about the build, this link is about the garage floors and the problems encountered after the build.
The additional one car garage was attached to the existing two car garage. To get unfettered access to the new garage, a large portion of the exterior wall of the existing garage had to be removed. There is virtually no way to get the new garage floor to exactly line up with the existing garage floor. In addition I now had different floors. The old garage floor was old concrete, complete with oil stains and remnants of my feeble attempt to paint the floor.
The new garage floor was virgin concreate, shiny and new.
Painting the floors was not an option. It would not address the unevenness between garage floors. I wanted a seamless floor between both garages.
I needed to call in the professionals, and be willing to pay them.
I live Florida. I did some research. The company I chose was TradeMark Garage Floors.
The challenge was simple but difficult.
Prepare the garage floor surface to accept their epoxy/magic dust treatment.
Make the transition between old and new garage floors seamless.
Put down a surface that I could work on without fear of destroying it.
Make it look good.
The technicians determined the old garage concrete floor would have to be ground down to expose virgin concreate. In addition the new garage floor would also have to be ground down to create a level transition between the old and new floors. I wondered how they would be able to do this.
Then they brought out the big boy.
Looking like something from a science fiction movie, this behemoth attacked the concrete with a ferocity that was frankly scary.
The massive beast was way too big to get into the various corners of the garage floors, that’s when they brought out its little brother.
Both machines, working together, made short work of removing the top layers of the concrete floors.
While the monster worked the middle of the floors the small grinders worked the corners and edges.
All the grinders had vacuum dust collector attached to them. They still could not collect all the concrete dust. Once the concrete grinding was complete to the satisfaction of the technicians, the massive amount of excess concrete dust was swept and vacuumed up.
There are only two types of concrete. One that has already cracked and one that will crack.
Using an unknown sealant, the technicians filled any existing cracks that were visible once the virgin concrete was exposed.
Some type of two part epoxy was then mixed up and applied to the floor using a roller.
Before the epoxy was dry another worker started to liberally sprinkle specific vinyl chips, (yellow arrows last photograph below) designed for garage floors, into the wet epoxy mix.
Note that this vinyl aggregate determines the color of the floor. There were a number of colors to choose from, including custom colors.
I chose blue. I like blue.
Excess chips are blown off the floor with a leaf blower and then scraped off with a large scraper.
At this point another evil smelling devil brew is mixed up.
This concoction is poured on the floor by a technician then brushed in with a roller and the excess immediately squeezed off by another technician.
The evil smelling garage floor is now left to dry. Be forewarned this stuff smells awful. I had to park the cars outside and leave the garage door partially open for a week before the smell subsided.
Having said that, the floors do look good.
The transition between the old and new garage floor is flawless.
The installers maintain that you can use a floor jack and jack stands on the floor. I might use a floor jack but I surely will not tempt fate with jack stands. Note: I have modified my jack stands (see photograph below).
Garage floor upgrade complete.
This is the only garage floor treatment that I recommend. You simply cannot get this level of effectiveness using any do it yourself process.
