Painting Concrete Garage Floors

 

JUNE: I have a two-car garage and we’ve been in our house about 23 years. I have always wanted to keep it looking as nice as I could, the concrete floor, and I have been so unfortunate not to be able to continue the pretty look whenever I paint it with a porch paint. Do you have any suggestions?

 

TOM: Yeah, porch paint is probably not the state-of-the-art material for painting concrete. We would recommend epoxy paint.

 

JUNE: OK.

 

TOM: The problem is that you’ve got a lot of layers of porch paint on there. You’re going to have to strip those off first or, at least get as much of it off as you can, because you can’t put good paint over bad paint; it’s still going to strip off.

 

JUNE: Right.

 

TOM: But when you get it down to a good surface, you can use an epoxy paint. It’s a two-part material; consists of a hardener and a base and when you mix them together you get about one to two hours to work with it and it flows really nice. It adheres very well. It’s very, very durable. You don’t have to wait nearly as long to use it. You won’t get as much hot tire pickup, which happens with the porch paint when you put your car in there and the tires are hot and then you back it out and the paint sticks to the tires.

 

JUNE: (overlapping voices) Yes, yes.

 

TOM: That doesn’t happen. And with a lot of the epoxy garage products, you can usually have some sort of an additive in there that’s like a speckle finish or something of that nature to get a little texture and helps hide the dirt.

 

JUNE: Yes.

 

TOM: So I would stop using the porch paint – not designed for that – and start using the epoxy paints.

 

JUNE: Well, I will certainly try that. Thank you so much.

 

TOM: Thank you so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.