Best flooring for a garage or workshop

A professionally installed one is excellent — ground or shot-blasted slab, high-build epoxy at 20 mil or more, broadcast media for grip, and a UV-stable polyurethane or polyaspartic topcoat because plain epoxy ambers in daylight. That system lasts decades. A rolled-on kit over an acid-etched slab is a different product entirely and often peels within a season, because acid etching rarely achieves the surface profile a real coating needs to key into.

Almost always because it never bonded. Two causes dominate. The slab was too smooth — ICRI 310.2R calls for a concrete surface profile of CSP 3 to 5 for high-build systems, and acid etching doesn’t reliably get there where grinding and shot blasting do. Or the slab was still giving up moisture, and vapor pressure pushed the coating off from underneath. Look at the back of a lifted piece: smooth and shiny means it never keyed in, damp or chalky means moisture did it.

It is when a warm tire, parked after a drive, sticks to the floor coating and lifts it away in patches as the car is moved. It is a bond failure rather than a heat-resistance problem — a properly prepared, fully cured coating doesn’t do it. It is the single most common complaint about consumer garage kits, and it is another symptom of the same underlying cause as peeling: inadequate surface preparation.

It is more reliable, because there is no coating to fail. Polishing grinds and densifies the slab you already own, so there is no adhesion to lose and nothing to peel or pick up on a hot tire. The trade-off is that you get the slab you have: existing cracks, color variation, trowel marks and old patch repairs are revealed by the process rather than hidden by it. A test panel on your actual slab tells you more than any brochure.