Hey guys, what's going on? It’s Seth here.
This video is a little bit different than what I normally do
but I wanted to take you along on the ride
as we get a new garage floor installed.
The reason we're doing this primarily is because we've got this spot right over there.
Actually, a couple of spots where every time it gets wet, like in the winter time,
or if my kids have the hose and they accidentally spread water in there, it is super slippery,
like dangerously slippery.
It's kind of like a hazard.
And one way to get this address is to put a new surface on here with these little chips on it
which will kind of give the floor more of a grippy texture to it.
Not like super grippy.
I mean, you can still potentially slip if it's wet, but it at least makes it a little bit less dangerous.
And the side benefit is that it's going to look way nicer in here.
The walls are all in drywall than insulated.
The only surface in this room that looks terrible is the floor.
So, if we can get the floor a little bit dressed up through this process, it'll really make
this whole garage look a lot nicer.
I'm just going to record the footage of these guys doing the work today.
Maybe I'll try to narrate a little bit about what they're doing just so we can understand how this works.
And, yeah, just thought I'd throw a little bit of entertainment in your way
if you're interested in this kind of thing.
The company I chose to work with was one near me called West Michigan Garage Interiors.
I'm sure there are probably companies all over the place in all 50 states that do the same kind of thing.
So from my garage, a three-star garage, I think this is like a pretty typical size job
for what these guys do.
They showed up with three guys, two trucks and two trailers.
And at first, I thought the way this was going to work was that this was going to be an epoxy floor coating,
just because I had heard of that a lot.
That's not what they were using.
They were using this chemical called polyaspartic, which is basically like a plastic floor coating.
And polyaspartic was first developed in the nineties as a coating for steel in bridges
because of its corrosion resistant properties.
So really the idea behind this stuff is whatever you put it on, it just locks it in there
and moisture can't get in or out of it.
And they ended up going through a few different steps in this process.
The first step was to sand down the entire garage floor.
And I think this is sort of similar to when you paint or stain a wooden deck
where really most of the work is in the prep work.
And if you don't do the prep work right, and then the end product is not going to look
the way it's supposed to, and it's probably not going to last either.
So the first step was to spend quite a while, sanding down the entire service,
they had this big kind of walk behind a sander that could cover most of the ground.
Then they also had to use hand sanders to get around the edges
to make sure that it a nice thorough job.
And I believe there were diamonds on these things
so that they could sand through the concrete effectively.
And so once everything was sanded down sufficiently, the next step was to go through and vacuum up
all the dust that they had created because it did create a lot of dust.
So after that, they created this mixture of, I don't know what the chemical was,
but some kind of liquid that's probably flammable with some kind of like concrete, mixed solutions
so that they had this paste that they could put over the cracks.
And I think it effectively acts like a glue or like a leveling compound.
And the point of this is not to make the cracks totally disappear at this point,
but it's so that when they put the next layers of stuff on and when they put the vinyl chips on
and then put the final sealer over that, like when you actually have the final product,
the goal is to make it so that you can't see any of the cracks beneath that surface.
So that's why they were doing this.
So they took a while to kind of basically do like spackling on the cement.
And once that was on there, guess what?
Then they had to sand it again.
So they sanded all that down to make it nice and leveled.
And then they had to blow that out again, to get rid of any more debris.
And then finally, after all that prep work was done, it was time to actually start putting down
the first coating of this polyaspartic.
And in order to do that, I'm not sure why exactly, but they had to mix small amounts
of acetone with the polyaspartic.
And then they just took this paint roller and put it all over the floor.
And they also had to hand paint around the corners. Basically, the same thing you would normally do
if you were painting a wall, they were just doing that on the floor with this chemical.
And once they had the whole floor coded pretty thoroughly with this first layer of polyaspartic,
which actually felt pretty sticky to the touch when it was wet like this,
the next stage was to do it all over again.
But this time they were going to actually add some color to this second layer.
And this color was going to be like the base that would sit underneath the vinyl chips
when they would throw them on.
So if for whatever reason, the vinyl chips didn't cover every square millimeter,
the background would be this color of paint.
And the paint is just mixed with the polyaspartic all over again.
So it's like another layer of protection of this plastic,
like material after it dries mixed with this paint color.
So they cover the entire ground all over again.
And it was a very similar process where they use the same kind of paint roller
and cut in around all the edges just to make sure everything was very thoroughly coated.
And then the next stage after that was to take the vinyl chips and throw them on this paint.
One thing I noticed by the way throughout this whole process is that they were able
to walk over the painted floor with these special shoes that had spikes on them.
So they weren't actually like leaving footprints or getting the stuff all over the shoes,
which I thought was kind of cool.
But when it came to throwing the vinyl chips all over the floor, they're actually doing it
like at the same time that they were painting this gray color on it.
So they would kind of just take one section of the floor at a time and cover the whole thing.
And then once the entire floor was very thoroughly covered and coated the next step after that
was to take blowers and blow all the excess vinyl chips off there.
So whatever wasn't adhering to the floor that had become off, and then they would take it
another step further after it was all blown off to take tools and sorta like chip off
anything that still wasn't coming off, just to make sure that the only violet chips that
were remaining on this floor where the chips
that were literally adhering to the polyaspartic beneath it.
I think the benefit of this is that you don't want lumps of chips that just happened to stay there.
You want it to be truly level, and you do that by getting rid of these excess vinyl chips.
So once they had all the excess vinyl chips blown off and scraped off, it was all sort of
pushed into a corner of the room and then there would scoop it up and then put it back
in their box because they could reuse these chips on future jobs.
So they're not just throw it away.
They actually reuse it.
And once everything was all cleared off and it was perfectly level, they proceeded to
put one final clear layer of the polyaspartic on these chips that had by this point set
to kind of lock them in place and keep them from moving around
and just put one final clear coat on everything.
And once they finish that all off, it was all pretty much done.
And we had to let it sit for, I think this has six hours before anybody could walk on it
in 24 hours before you could put anything heavy on it.
And 48 hours before you could actually drive your car in there and park it on there.
In terms of just the aesthetic improvement
I mean, you can see the before and after results yourself.
I mean, it was just so much better.
It just looked amazing.
The floor has a nice shine and texture to it.
And the nice thing about this kind of floor is that it doesn't really show dirt or grime
that well because of this textured color from the vinyl chips.
So you actually can get a little bit dirty and it's not going to look terrible
as if this was like just one solid gray color
like you would normally see with an epoxy floor coating or just like a solid white,
like you would see in a really nice airplane hanger or something like that.
With this kind of texture to look to it
it just kind of hides dirt a little bit and it still looks pretty nice.
One thing I will say is that I was actually surprised at how slippery this still was,
particularly if it gets wet.
I had this idea in my mind that it would be a huge improvement from how slippery
some of the spots were on our old floor.
It was actually just as slippery, if not more slippery than our floor was to begin with.
And I think one way you can resolve that is to put this stuff that they call shark bite
into the floor, as they're putting it down.
And we actually thought about doing that,
but we didn't really know how grippy it would end up being with or without it.
So we kind of had to go into it blind without really knowing what the result would be.
And I really wish we would've done it because once we felt how slippery this floor was,
it just occurred to me that this isn't going to work.
So we called them back and we had them go over
all the existing floor that they had just beautifully done.
They had to take this sand machine and sort of scuff it all up.
And then they took a layer of acetone and put that on it to kind of open up the polyaspartic again.
And then they painted everything again with another layer of the polyaspartic.
And then as that coat was fresh, they took these little shark bite ships,
which are really, really tiny.
And what it is is aluminum oxide.
And they hardly use any of it.
I think they said this container will last,
something like the entire season as they're sprinkling this on various garage floors.
So it doesn't take a lot of it, but they just sprinkle it over the entire floor
as that new layer of polyaspartic is drying.
And then the same process. We had to let it sit for six hours before we could put anything on there.
And then 24 hours before we could put the cars on there.
And it makes a noticeable difference.
I won't say it's like a hundred percent slip free when it's wet, but it's way, way better.
I know when you step on this floor with your socks,
you can kind of feel it catch on your socks a little bit.
And it just makes a huge difference once this is on there.
So if you're ever getting this kind of floor, and if you have any doubts or concerns about
whether it's going to be too slippery, get the shark bite,
it's totally worth it for that extra grippiness.
And I'm really glad we did this and I wish we would have done it the first time they came around.
So that was our journey of getting a new garage floor.
And if you ever decided to do this in your garage or your basement floor or wherever, I wish you all the best.