This is the Epic Urban Homestead garage. And it's kind of nothing right now.
The reason why is because I really want to make this a space that I can build
projects, I can hang out,
I can design to be the ultimate thing that I use to build the stuff for the
Garden and the Homestead. But to do that,
there are a lot of things that need to change.
And the first thing I want to change is the floor.
Let me show it to you right now. So the floor out here is just concrete.
They painted some of it.
But in here they've sort of skim-coated it with some more
concrete and it's really rough. Catches dirt like crazy,
it's hard to get it out of there and it just doesn't look that clean to me.
And I do want this to be just like the perfect workspace.
And so what I'm doing is I'm hiring a team to come out
and grind this down to be nice and smooth.
And then they're going to coat it with what's called Polyaspartic.
So in this video,
I'm going to take you through the entire process of how they grind it down and
how they coat it. Polyaspartic, for those of you who don't know,
is basically like epoxy, but it's even better.
It does not yellow in UV light and it has a lot more resistance to anything sort
of dropping on it. And I'm probably going to be dropping stuff in here,
especially as I'm pretty new to building stuff. So the team's about to come.
I will take you along on the process.
Cultivate that Like button and let's get into it.
The
first thing that the team had to do was see how much of this weird top coat
of cement they could chip off. Now,
when Paul from Perkins Custom Coatings came out to quote this job,
he didn't know if that could be removed easily.
And so he said it might be a bit of a crazy job,
even though it's a small garage. And I said, you know what,
let's still give it a go and see what happens.
But fortunately you could see the team is not having too big of a problem just
chipping this off. So I think what happened is the remodelers,
when they came into the house,
they just wanted to cover up the old garage floor,
make it look a little more salable - which they did because I bought it.
But you know it, in the end, was kind of a sloppy job. And so they chip it away.
Now, as these chips came off,
we actually came across a potential problem with a wet spot.
Like this dark spot here. Yeah, exactly. So
you think there's like water underneath that's? There's something underneath.
Could be a lot of moisture. So yeah, I mean that,
that explains why it lifted up so much because. Because it's not sealed.
Not that it's not sealed but it just, the moisture makes everything like pop up.
A patch here or anything that you may use makes it pop right up.
So that explains why, in this area, it came off really easy. Like over there,
you see how it's not so wet? Yeah.
And it didn't come off as easy as it did here.
And you can tell it's wet here just cause of discoloration. Yeah you can just.
Look if you touch it you just, you can tell there's moisture. Oh, look at that.
Yeah. Like it's not wet to the touch necessarily, but it's definitely not dry.
It's not like this over here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's dry for sure.
That's dry for sure. I wonder what would be causing that though.
After identifying the wet spot,
I was a little bit worried as to if that would add a lot of time or expense to
the job. But the job continued for that day with the initial grind.
And so they use these really intense machines with diamond-plated blades
that kind of spin around really,
really fast and just make short work of cement or concrete.
And so they just go straight through. Now what's interesting about this again,
is this is a small job for a team like this. They'll do big warehouses,
they'll do huge resorts, things like that.
But this small little garage still did some damage on these plates,
which they erode anyways. That's the nature of the game when you're grinding.
But we ground through a full set of plates with only half the garage.
Day one is complete and there were a few issues. Number one,
they had to hammer and chip off the entire skim coat of cement that had that
paint on top of it.
I think that was just a cosmetic thing that the flippers did and THEN get into
the grind. And so on the grind, it's still actually not completely level.
There's quite a bit of grinding probably left to do. It just took a while.
And it was really uneven, probably some really old concrete here. Fortunately,
not a lot of cracking, but just like way off balance.
Went through a couple of the pads on the grinder really quickly. And they said,
normally that takes at least a thousand square feet.
This is nowhere near a thousand square feet.
So some really big differences in the elevation. But another problem,
that I'm actually sitting on right now,
is a little bit of moisture buildup right here that we're not exactly sure how
much of a problem that will be. Cause if there's moisture here,
then the coating that you put down, it won't adhere as well.
And so you could get this little pocket where the coating just ends up coming up
or looking deformed or something.
So I guess we'll stay tuned until next time they come out to see what happens
right here. As we move into day two,
Brandon from Perkins Custom Coatings came out to take a look at that wet spot
and see if it was going to cause any serious problems in the job.
And fortunately he found out that it wasn't really a
moisture issue.
It was more the fact that whoever owned this house in the past had probably
decades worth of oil just dripping onto one spot that was seeping its way
through the concrete. So fortunately he said,
that's an easier thing to fix because they can scrape it away and then torch off
the rest. Day two commenced with more grinding down.
But then they also had to torch that oil, like I mentioned before.
It's a pretty simple process.
You're basically just trying to burn it off and suck that oil up out of the
concrete so that there's no moisture there.
So that when you actually do the coating, which we'll see later,
it doesn't just de-laminate right away. As day three of the process began,
it really was more about getting the floor nice and level.
And so they used some leveling compound here that sets really quickly,
and then they can then grind it one final time to smooth off those levels.
And so this is mostly filling in the low spots.
It was really cool to see because it set super fast and they could just spot
treat certain areas based on how low they were. Now,
this wasn't a laser-leveled concrete floor,
but it's going to be level to about an eighth of an inch or so.
And so there's not going to be a whole lot of waviness.
And getting a laser level out here or using self-leveling concrete would just be
a totally different part of the job that honestly,
it's a little bit overkill for what I'm looking for.
The final grinding phase is now going on here. You can see they're going at it.
And this is just to grind off any lips that have been created from the
leveling compound to do a final smoothing pass.
And then they'll come back and do a tiny little bit of spot treating on any
final little bits of leveling and do one final grind.
And then they go into the base coat stage, which is really cool.
Now what's interesting about this company, quite frankly,
and they didn't pay me to say this, I paid full price for this job,
is the level of detail.
There are so many different steps that I think other people would skip
in prepping this floor. Most of the job is the prep.
I would say almost all of it in fact is the prep.
And it's really cool to see the level of detail they put in this.
Now that we are finally at the step where we can put a base coat down,
it's just an epoxy base.
And the reason why is because epoxy is basically the best style of base coat
that you can put down.
The polyaspartic is what comes after the base coat and the chipping,
which you're going to see in a second. So right now, I don't know,
after watching the whole process,
watching the epoxy get rolled on and this nice smooth coat go over
the top of the garage floor is just such a satisfying feeling.
I said satisfying and the most satisfying part is right now.
I chose the coastal blue paint chips to spread over.
And they wear these awesome spike shoes so that they don't mess up the base coat
that they just walked on.
So kind of a cool little trick of the trade right there.
But what they'll do now is just toss chips.
And they'll put about 70 pounds of paint chips on the surface of this base
coat while it's still wet so it adheres to the base coat.
And then the next day they come back and they'll actually blow out probably
30 pounds of those chips and recover them.
But they overchip it to make sure that a hundred percent of that surface is
covered.
What you're seeing happen here is blowing away the chips to paint the outer
edge.
Now the outer edge is the area which the garage door does NOT
cover. So it's basically the line where the garage door hits the garage floor.
The reason why they paint that a solid color is because it's exposed to the
light because it's outside of the garage.
And if you were to put chips on that and do it the exact same way as the rest of
the garage,
the chips outside would actually discolor faster than the chips inside.
So it would look off.
And so what they do is they preemptively solve that problem by creating
a solid color, basically just the base coat.
And they'll put the base coat down, very delicately paint that,
they'll sprinkle some sand on top of that base coat because without the chips,
it actually is quite slick. And so they'll sprinkle a couple layers of sand,
they'll re-base coat that, let that dry.
And then they'll come back tomorrow for the final coat of everything.
We are here at the final day of this process.
Can I tell you how excited I am to show you guys the end result!
So the first thing they do is they sweep up all of the chips that are just
sitting on the surface. Remember,
they overchipped it to make sure that everything got covered.
And after that they come in with a scraper and just make sure that they
get off any uneven rough spots because remember,
we're still putting on the polyaspartic coating at the very end here.
And you don't want to put it over a rough surface.
So they spend a good amount of time chipping, scraping,
and then vacuuming up all the chips, which do get reused, which is really cool.
Now that the scraping is complete we're at the point where we can finally put on
the polyaspartic clear coat. So you can see them mixing it here.
It's very particular. It's a two part mixture much like the epoxy.
So you have to be very, very precise in how you do this. If you mix it wrong,
either it's too tacky or it just doesn't even set up in the correct way that we
need to have this nice strong floor coating.
So what they do is they come around the side edges and they'll put that together
first.
And then they come in with a roller and put in more around the sides.
And then finally they'll take a squeegee and a larger roller
to apply it to the rest of the floor as evenly as possible. Again,
using those spike shoes to get the job done.
And then the final final step is to remove the tape and on this outer edge
that we talked about earlier,
they're going to coat it with one more layer of the epoxy base coat to really
seal in that grit.
So that you don't slip on that outer little skirt to the garage that's
outside the garage door when it closes.
So now it's time for what you've all been waiting for. The final product!
Here we are sitting on the new polyaspartic coated garage floor.
I could not be happier about this! I can even see a little bit of the shine,
almost a reflection, almost mirror-esque. As you can see,
I've already moved in some workbenches.
I've got a little rowing machine over here, my Indo board balance trainer.
And it feels like a garage now.
Now what's funny is you put this floor in and then all of a sudden these sides
of the garage look a little bit not finished. And in fact, they aren't finished.
As you can see the studs are here. So later on,
I'm going to be probably dry walling this up and fixing up some of the
electrical. I only have two outlets in here.
But I'm really excited about this floor. The guys did an amazing job.
I became more or less obsessed with the process,
almost in a "how it's made" or a "dirty jobs" kind of way.
And I hope you enjoyed following along on the journey. All the info,
if you're looking for this type of service and you're in the Southern California
area, will be down in the video description.
I could not recommend these guys enough. As you saw,
they went really above and beyond as far as their prep work and all that.
So thank you so much for watching.
Good luck in the garden and the homestead and keep on growing.