Coat the garage floor with polyaspartic or epoxy? Put in an air conditioner?

by philg

For the first time in my life, I live in a house with a reasonably nice garage. The floor is a concrete slab poured in 2003. For a lot of neighbors, however, this is apparently not sufficient. Because there are no basements in Florida, the garage is a critical storage facility and also sometimes the home of N-1 or N-2 cars (where N is the theoretical capacity of the garage in cars).

Does it make sense to put in a plastic floor? The cost is about $2,700 for a polyaspartic floor, which dries quickly and therefore enables the contractor to show up from 9 am to 2 pm and the homeowner to put everything back into the garage by 3 or 4 pm. The old religion was epoxy, which I think resulted in two days of downtime for the garage and two visits by the contractor, but Science now says that polyaspartic is better?

Readers who’ve done this: Why? And what material?

Also, I’m thinking that items stored in the garage will be in better shape if the temperature and humidity are limited to some extent. It will also help with my dream Internet system since the CAT5 wires all come back to a panel in the garage and typical modems and routers are rated to operate at temperatures no higher than 40C (104 degrees in the units that God prefers). Does it make sense to try to keep the garage to a maximum of 85 or 90 degrees with a split system?

Finally, if polyaspartic is the right choice, what color? The exterior has a lot of beige and the garage door is brown, so I was thinking of “Saddle Tan”. On the other hand, most of the ones that I’ve seen are gray (e.g., “Midnight” or “Smoke” below). “California Gray” can be ruled out since we don’t want to have to wear masks and show our vaccine papers in the garage. There is no “Blue Steel” or “Magnum”, sadly.

40 thoughts on “Coat the garage floor with polyaspartic or epoxy? Put in an air conditioner?”

  1. Pick a color that doesn’t camouflage metal screws, etc when you drop them. My color looked good until I dropped a screw and had a hard time finding it.

  2. I have an Aprilaire Dehumidifier in my garage. Keeps the humidity at 55% which is more important than temperature. I have block construction so garage never gets very warm, just humid.

  3. Save the money you would spend for coating and use it to put in a sealed and insulated garage door. Then put in a good small AC unit and dehumidifier for the garage. All the garage coatings will fail and chip and look bad in a few years. You are better off staying with natural cement. Then deep clean the floor every few years.

  4. I painted the garage floor in my rental unit with grey garage floor paint. Apparently, I didn’t prep the floor well enough before rolling the paint, and the paint eventually came loose from the floor in the spots where the car tires rest.

    Regarding a “split” AC system: My 65-y/o FL CBS house had central AC installed about three decades ago, and the 4-ton system works quite well (installed 4 years ago for $5500 including ten-year parts & labor warranty).

    Last year, I decided I want to be able to spot cool the two 2nd floor bedrooms on the south side and a 300 sf media room on the lower level also on the south side. I got four estimates and hired a local well-established AC contractor for a 2-ton, 3-head split system, installed for $7900 including 10-year warranty, at $0 down, 0% financing for three years through Wells Fargo.. The installation went smoothly; however, Wells Fargo debited the full $7900 on my checking account on the first monthly payment. Nonetheless, the system works great.

    During June 2021, I had a 2-ton central AC system installed at my rental unit for $7000 (including 10-year parts & labor warranty). I’ve spent over $20K in new AC equipment over the past four years!

  5. I’ve got no experience with polyaspartic flooring but one consideration is that the concrete slab will expand and contract with temperature swings so unless the garage is climate controlled I would imagine that the surface will eventually begin to crack if the swings are too large? I would discuss that with any potential installer before you commit to it.

    I suppose it also depends on how durable the coating is – for example, if you use a floor jack to lift a car – concentrating the weight on the small wheels without putting something under them, will it damage the surface?

    The coatings are visually appealing but durability would be a concern for me, in other words. I note that most “working” garages and repair shops seem to use bare concrete slab flooring, whereas the polyaspartic flooring seems more “showroom” than “workspace.” Just my impression.

    I like @bill and @Marcus’ advice inre: humidity control. One nice thing about a dehumidifier is using the collection tank to water your decorative plants (I don’t know about watering Mindy the Crippler’s bowl with it.) Yes, it’s another appliance to fail but a good one should last ten years or more. I bought one in Chicago (at Sears!) a long time ago and it’s still working! It makes a big difference in the “mustiness” factor.

  6. Don’t coat your garage floor unless you are planning to use the garage for storage only or extra room such as a gym. Simply power wash (and for extra cleaning also steam wash) the existing concrete flooring and call it a day. You can rent the tools from your local Home Depot and get this done yourself.

    Any kind of coating you use will wear off, get painted or greased over, or give-in to the elements in no time and it will look far worse than what you have now — because dirty spots, peeled and cracked paint areas will stand out far more then if you had raw concrete that gets dirty over time.

  7. I’m in the camp no coating – what exactly are you trying to achieve by applying coating? “Protect from the spilled liquids?” What liquids are you likely to ever spill in the garage?

    AC probably will need a cut off switch when door is open, btw.

  8. For a single tile I’d only consider Light Gray, Smoke, California Gray and Saddle Tan. Unfortunately I find California Gray the most elegant!

    For a larger area, perhaps Light Gray or Smoke look better (I think one needs to see a larger area to decide).

  9. If you plan on using the garage for storage and cars I’d skip the coating all together. If you want a space where you will be walking around I like those snap together foam mats available at a private shopping club called costco.

  10. I decided not to. The problem is, apparently, that vehicle tires contract as they cool and rip the coating off the floor over time. I wasn’t confident I could persuade the other driver in the house to wait until the tires were cool before parking the truck in the garage.

  11. Why not multiple colors? Florida Red as the main color and Calfornia Gray painted in the shape of the state of California, and Maskataxachussets. Then you can step over them and/or drive over them, just like Saddam did with George Bush’s mosaic on the hotel floor in Baghdad.

  12. I am not sure why there’s so much negativity wrt. epoxy coating. I had garage concrete floor done at my two my last houses and did not have any chipping or coating getting loose even with the harsh temperature variation in MA. I had two cars parked inside garage and other than some spots getting dirty because of melting snow and salt, I did not have any peeling due to tire movement. Cleaning epoxy covered floor was/is also much easier than cleaning raw concrete because the latter is porous and absorbs contaminants.

    The critical stage is concrete preparation, of course, but it’s not rocket science and if done properly ensures good results. A decent company uses a grinder and acid etching to ensure adhesion.

  13. I had an epoxy coating installed (professionally with acid etch first) 3 years ago. Sealed with two coats of clear finish.

    The garage temperatures during the year vary from +30c to -40c (or +100f to -40f for you dinosaurs) as this is well north of the 49th parallel. Cars drive on it all the time so salt and gravel comes in. A simple wash clears it up. No cracking or spelling in the 3 years. The floor was quite old (mid 70s, as am I) and was showing signs of degradation with winter salt. All good at the moment.

  14. Home Depot has the kits to do this yourself for around $150.00. We did our garage over 15 years ago and it still looks fine….and yes we drive cars on it.

    Basically, you clean the floor, roll the paint on it, throw the glitter-like particles in the air and they fall pretty evenly, and then apply as many clear coats as you want. Pretty simple.

  15. You’ve really turned into a Right Wingnut since your days, at MIT, Phil? now that you live in the land of bugs and hi humidity!! 🤣😂🙄🤔 “California Gray”… give me an F’ing break, dude! It’s just a dang paint color name! Why put politics into every damn posting??

    • @Hal Atosis: Your breath stinks. You should wash your mouth out with some rainbow-colored Listerine and go take a shower, too. And should know by now that the Personal is Political and always will be, especially if you also went to a “good school” like MIT or Harvard – or really, anywhere else now, for that matter.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_personal_is_political

      https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/harvard-awards-seven-honorary-degrees-2/

    • TS: I’m trying to figure out if the communication between WordPress and the caching proxy has failed somehow. That’s usually why people repeat comments. (Since they refresh the page and don’t see their comment immediately.)

    • Hal: If people suspected of not agreeing with left-wing beliefs (i.e., “right wingnuts”) are “nuts”, shouldn’t they be interned in a psychiatric hospital until they are cured?

      (Separately, I disagree that the U.S. political system can be divided into “left” and “right” because those terms imply a coherent political philosophy. Seeking to transfer tax dollars to the people who vote for you is not a philosophy.)

    • I don’t think anything has failed. It’s clear to me Hal is a dumb dumb.

    • philg: You can’t claim to refute everything Fauci says then hide behind him, that’s beyond pathetic.

      Perplexed: better than non-artificial unintelligence like you I guess?

  16. @Toucan Sam, 🤡 whatever… go back to shitting on the floor like the rest of your species… what an assclown! I simply stated that for whatever reasons philig can’t seem to post anything including simple mundane posts about garage floor coatings without some damn political rant… so unlike when I knew him at MIT! 🙄🙄 He can be whatever he wants to be…

    • Hal: “the land of bugs”? If it is warm enough to walk outside without a jacket in Maskachusetts, it’s also prime bug biting time. In our part of Florida, by contrast, it is rare to encounter a biting or annoying flying insect.

    • Notice how champagne socialists always get mad (while preaching peace, love and codes of conduct at the same time …) if they don’t control our speech? Soon our host will be accused of championing a “Don’t say California bill”!

    • Anon: I find it odd that anyone would be offended at the allusion to the association between California and common sense measures of showing SARS-CoV-2 who is boss such as mask orders and forced vaccination.

    • ah “forced vaccination” – philg a keen proponent of making polio big again.

      Anonymous – you’re talking about a “Don’t say .. ” Bill as a rebuttal against _socialists_ when that’s literally Republican legislation?

      Clowns of world unite!

    • Second Anon: It is a worrying phenomenon that people reply to keywords in other people’s posts without attempting to understand meaning, context and humor.

      Especially, when some of them like Hal imply they are MIT-educated, but that of course could be a product of affirmative action.

    • FirstAnon: I was replying to the entirety of your post, if there was any “humor” in it you failed to land the punchline.

      Phil “claims” to have attended MIT, why is it some ludicrous assertion?

    • Second anon: Thanks for “philg a keen proponent of making polio big again.”

      This is a good reminder for everyone to learn at the feet of St. Fauci regarding why COVID-19 and polio cannot be compared. See the Scripture of Fauci, Big Science v. March 2022, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9129114/ “the virus that causes COVID-19, is so different from polio and measles that classical herd immunity may not readily apply to it. Important differences include the phenotypic stability of polio and measles viruses, and their ability to elicit long-term protective immunity, compared to SARS-CoV-2. … Moreover, neither infection nor vaccination appears to induce prolonged protection against SARS-CoV-2 in many or most people.”

      (In other words, the COVID-19 “vaccines” don’t discourage SARS-CoV-2 from making itself big again and again and again. As I’ve noted here before, I think the COVID-19 injections should be called “COVID shots” so that they don’t make the public skeptical regarding vaccines that actually work!)

    • Second Anon responses sound like another failure of AI. Some people can not function without it, MIT notwithstanding.

  17. Well Philg might be true where you live in Florida… not my own experience on my many trips to your new home state…

    • Somehow I was never bothered by bugs on my multiple Florida trips. I mostly wore biker t-shirts and jackets. I guess Florida flying insects are suckers for hot woke lymphatic liquids.

    • @Hal, was it Florida’s “bugs” that kicked you off to write such as foul language post? If so, I then have the right to also speak my mind when everyone is trying to brainwash me and my kids with all this Rainbow bull*hit that I disagree with.

      At work, I’m forced to take online “educational” training courses and I must pass the follow-up test and be certified. Of course, the only way to pass is to answer the questions to-their-satisfaction, which means I have to agree to whatever rainbow bull*hit I’m subjected to. If I fail the test, I’m reported to the “righteous” department to be questioned. And incase you are wondering, yes, few brave souls objected and they were disciplined.

      If that wasn’t enough, at school, our kids are being subjected to take in-class “educational” courses on sexuality and why they must accept the mind set of LGBTQ. Well, fu*k you. I don’t want you to brainwash my kids. Can’t you just stick to STEM and be done with it? After all, decades ago they said religion has no place in schools, isn’t this LGBTQ and #Pride education brainwashing a new religion being forced onto our society?

      So, if “California Gray” offends you, then know that #Pride and LGBTQ bull*hit offends me.

    • George A, you mentioned “work” to an MIT genius. It is so beneath his/her/etc dignity. Florida “bugs” issue is very reflective of how MIT folks I worked with relate to real world problems. The genius is very good to scare young women out of Ada Lovelace’s invented profession, that’s about it.
      Hal, what are the most recent advance on P vs NP problem?

  18. > After all, decades ago they said religion has no place in schools, isn’t this LGBTQ and #Pride education brainwashing a new religion being forced onto our society?

    No? Science != religion. Science says some people are gay. Get over it you f*ckwit.

  19. > Heck, if #Pride wants to teach their messed up ideology at our public school and do so because it is #Science like you say so, then why not also indoctrinate our kids the ideology of Sharia Law?

    What in the actual fuck are you talking about? I agree w/ Toucan Sam – you’re a dumb dumb.

    • Thanks for the GaragePride link! A rainbow-tiled garage floor would be awesome. If they’re going to have “Pride” in their name they should give me the rainbow pattern that would enable me to celebrate Pride Month all year long while also avoiding conflict with the HOA.

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