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Why bother painting a garage floor? It’s only going to get oil, grease and other junk spilled all over it? Is it really worth the effort?

Why Paint Your Garage Floor?

• Firstly, It’ll look better. If it looks better it’ll feel better. You want to feel better about your garage, right?
• It’ll be easier to clean. Once it’s been coated, it’ll be nice and smooth, making it much easier to just wipe up spills and stains.
• Protection. Part of painting the floor is sealing it. Commonly it’ll get sealed with a clear epoxy finish that will protect the paint from scuffs and scratches and spills.  Especially corrosive chemical spills or spills of oil, gasoline, or other solvents that you might be using in the garage.
• Fixing small cracks, etc. A thick layer of paint can cover small cracks and even prevent them from getting bigger.
• Resale value! A nice clean garage floor is worth more than a dirty old floor with oil stains and cracks all over it.

How to Paint Your Garage Floor

First, you have to get everything out of your garage. You’re going to need to keep everything out for a couple of days, so make sure you have space to store all that stuff. Alternately, you can move all the stuff off half of the garage first and coat it, then when it’s finished, you move everything back to the other side and finish the floor there. Ideally, though, you want to do the whole thing at once to keep the time it takes as short as possible.

The 2nd step is to clean the floor. Start with sweeping and then use a mop and bucket or a hose with a spray nozzle to clear off as much as possible. If you have stains, you might want to use a degreaser or a detergent to get the floor as clean as you can before you start painting. If you don’t get things clean enough, then the paint may not stick well and that can cause problems down the road.

Some concrete painting kits will also come with an etching solution. The purpose of the etching solution is to use a mild acid to gently eat into the old surface of your floor to make it more amenable to soaking up the new paint. Commonly, this is a citric acid solution. Once this has done its job, then you need to hose the floor down… again. This will clean off all the etching solution.

After that has dried, you can paint your floor. Use paint that is designed for coating concrete. Not all paint is the same and not all paint is made to stick to concrete, especially after that concrete has heated up in the summer and cooled to below zero in the winter. Those conditions can cause a lot of problems if you use the wrong paint. The paint, of course, is just the first coat. The coat with the coloring (commonly a shade of gray). After the paint has dried you can seal the floor.

A sealant is usually an epoxy coating or a coating with epoxy in it. True epoxy comes in two containers which must be mixed together just before application. This has to go on thick and smooth to coat the whole floor. It may take a day or two to completely dry and cure. Don’t park your car on it until it has completely cured. Otherwise, you may end you with your car epoxy’d to the floor or ugly tire tracks where your car was.

Hire Professional Painters, Such as Excellent Painters

If this seems like a whole lot of work to you, (it does to us) then maybe you’d rather just have someone else do all the dirty work. Let the professionals at Excellent Painters do all that cleaning, etching, painting, and sealing. You still have to move your stuff out of the way, but you don’t have to mix the epoxy or worry about splashing paint on the walls. Ther photos here are all of a garage floor that Excellent Painters in Lakewood, Colorado coated. They finished the whole job in one day.