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.

Epoxy Garage Flooring: Like A Rock. A Painted Rock.

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.

Colorful Epoxy Garage Floor Coatings

Most epoxy coatings are gray. Very shiny, very attractive gray…but still quite gray. Just because it's gray, though, don't think you're not going to notice a very obvious improvement over a cement garage floor, because you definitely will. Lots of people would prefer to have some sort of color, though, and such things do exist. It's an unfortunate fact, though, that colorful epoxy kits are kind of rare. It's not uncommon for a hardware store to tell their customers that the only color that epoxy is available in is gray, which is not at all true. You may have to do some looking, but it's not hard to find garage floor coating kits on the internet, and a lot of times they're cheaper than at the hardware store. The only problem I ever have with buying things online is that it becomes such a problem if you need to do a return…but with a garage floor kit, I doubt that would be an issue.

Concrete Garage Floor No Want Epoxy!

To answer that question, you will have to do some investigating. As opposed to any other type of garage floor, Epoxy does take some preparing. Even after being prepared, though, some concrete just can't handle an epoxy coating, for various reasons. If your concrete can take a coating, however, there's still the matter of cleaning and etching it, which is quite tedious and very labor intensive. For those of us that aren't in the best of shape, laying an epoxy garage floor may not be an option. There are other, simpler types of garage floors that aren't nearly as time sensitive, such as garage floor tiles that you can stop and come back to whenever you like. There's also smaller garage floor mats that can be moved around the garage to wherever you need them. That may be all you need. But, if your body or bank account can handle either installing or having someone install an epoxy garage floor coating, it sure would look a lot nicer, wouldn't it?