Oneonta garage floors built for a truck every day
An attached garage that a pickup uses every day needs more than a coat of paint. Taylor grinds the slab open, repairs the cracks and the edge at the door, then builds flake under a clear topcoat that hot tires cannot lift.
What a daily truck does to a garage slab
Garages and covered porches are most of what Taylor does in town, and the garage with a pickup in it every working day is the harder test. A floor that looks good in the photos and lets go under the first warm tire is no use to anybody. So the system gets picked for what the truck does to it, three things in particular.
Hot tires
A tire coming in off the highway is hot enough to soften a thin one-part garage paint, and when it cools it peels that paint up with it. A 100% solids epoxy base on a ground slab, finished in polyaspartic, does not soften that way, so the tire has nothing to grab.
Rain and mud off the tires
Whatever the truck brings home drips off in the garage: rainwater and mud from a work site. The clear topcoat keeps all of it out of the concrete and wipes clean, and the chip field keeps a little dirt from looking like a lot.
Jack stands and dropped tools
A jack stand puts a lot of weight on a very small footprint, and a wrench dropped from the tailgate lands hard. The full flake build handles that kind of point load, and the broadcast pattern hides the scuffs a working garage collects over time.
Old garage paint gets ground off, never coated over
The photo here is a two-car garage before Taylor started on it. Somebody had painted that floor gray at some point, and the paint had worn through to bare concrete. That is what garage paint does. It sits on a slab that was never opened up, so it has nothing to hold on to, and it lets go wherever the tires turn and stop.
Putting a new coating over old paint makes the new floor only as strong as the paint underneath, which on a floor like this one is not strong at all. So the first pass with the diamond grinder takes paint, glue and any old sealer down to clean concrete and leaves a surface like fine sandpaper for the base to bite into. The whole build-up, coat by coat, is on the garage floor epoxy page, and the finished floors in the gallery show where a slab like this one ends up.
Coved edges, the floor drain and the door threshold
The line where the floor meets the wall is where a garage collects leaves, dust and whatever drips off the truck. Taylor can carry the flake four to six inches up the wall as a cove, which closes that joint so a hose and a push broom actually get it clean. It has to be settled before grinding day, because the bottom of the wall gets prepped in the same pass as the slab.
A floor drain is masked off and the coating is finished neatly at the grate, never poured into it. The threshold under the overhead door is the other edge that matters, since that is where rainwater sits and grit piles up. Broken concrete along that edge is rebuilt first so the coating stops on something solid. All of this is easier to sort out with the slab in front of him, so tell Taylor what the garage looks like now and he will come out.
Great experience from start to finish. He showed up exactly when promised, did everything he said he would, and the epoxy flooring in my garage and front porch looks amazing.
Belinda M.
Planning the days around the garage
A standard two-car garage takes Taylor three to four days on site, and the truck stays out a while longer after that. If the garage is really a gym or a hangout room more than a parking spot, the flake floors Taylor puts in Oneonta outbuildings and basements are worth reading too.
Before Taylor shows up
The garage needs to be empty down to the bare floor, shelving included, and anything mounted low on the walls comes down if the floor is being coved. The chest freezer needs a temporary home, and the breaker for the garage should be easy to reach. If your dates are tight, let Taylor know when the garage can be cleared and the job gets planned around it.
After the topcoat goes down
You can walk across it the next morning. Vehicles wait five to seven days while the coating hardens, and pulling the truck in early is the one shortcut that leaves marks you can see, so line up a spot in the driveway before work starts. Questions about the schedule, call Taylor at (256) 365-6535.
More floor work around Oneonta
Not every slab on the property is the garage. Pick the room you are working on.
Flake Epoxy
Outbuildings, shop offices and basements.
Concrete Sealing
Grind and seal for shops and barns.
Patio Coatings
Covered porches, carports and patios.
Polyurethane Floors
Solid color shop floors with a tough topcoat.
Oneonta, AL
Every floor system, Oneonta wide.
Garage Floor Epoxy
The full build-up, step by step.
Garage questions from Oneonta truck owners
Can you coat over the paint already on my garage floor?
No. Old paint is the weakest layer on the slab, and anything laid on top of it is only as strong as that paint’s grip on the concrete. Taylor grinds it off with diamonds down to clean concrete first. It adds time on a heavily painted floor, and it is the reason the new floor stays down.
What do you do about cracks in a garage slab?
They are repaired as part of the job. Each crack is chased out and filled with a rigid polyurea that gets ground flush, and broken concrete near the door is rebuilt so the coating ends on something solid. A slab with a lot of damage can add a day, and Taylor will tell you that when he looks at it.
Will grinding fill the house with dust?
The grinders run with HEPA vacuums attached, so the dust is pulled away at the machine instead of drifting through the house. Grinding day is loud, though, the noisiest part of the whole job. If somebody works from home on the other side of the garage wall, it is worth planning their day around it.
Is a flake garage floor slippery when it is wet?
Less than a smooth coating would be. The chip gives the surface some texture, so a wet tire track or rain dripping off the truck does not turn it into glass. If your garage stays wet a lot, Taylor can add a fine grit to the topcoat for more grip underfoot.
Can you coat the apron outside the garage door?
It can be done, but the apron is a different exposure from the floor inside. It takes full sun and standing water, so it needs a UV-stable topcoat and usually more texture underfoot. Taylor prices it as its own line on the paperwork so you can decide whether it is worth adding.
Can we still use the door from the garage into the house?
Not while the coats are going down. Plan on coming and going by the front door for the days Taylor is working. Foot traffic is fine the next day after the topcoat, so the house door opens again well before the truck can come back in at five to seven days.
Bring Taylor out to the garage
Tell him how big the garage is, what is on the floor now and what you park in it, and he will come out and give you a real number.