Weekend Project: Sealing The Garage Floor
Forgive me for this self-congratulatory post, but I wanted to share the fruits of our labor this weekend. As promised in my Friday post, the wife and I spent some time on both Saturday and Sunday to seal the garage floor with epoxy. This project was both easier and harder than I thought it would be, but was well worth the effort. For your edification, here are a couple “before” pictures of our garage:
Ugly, I know. It had to change. There was no way I could continue to go through life knowing that our garage looked this pathetic.
And so, after conversing with Karin about the sad state of our garage we jammed on down to the local Home Despot and picked up a couple cartons of Epoxy Shield. Borrowing a power washer from my dad we got to work clearing out the few boxes sitting in one of the corners, hosed out the garage, then used the included cement cleaner from the kit and gave the entire floor a good scrub then a final rinse. The entire process took just 90 minutes. That was day one. Easy peasy.
Day two, we taped out various parts of the wall and around the garage door hardware, then painted the side walls with hand brushes (which was the most difficult and time-consuming part of this job), eventually working our way to the floor and a hand roller attached to a broom handle. This last piece was cake, and was actually quite enjoyable. As I painted, Karin followed up with the decorative sprinkles. This painting portion took just 2.5 hours to complete. This is what our garage looks like now:
Ignore the tape along the bottom of the walls. As soon as the epoxy dries we'll remove it
Oddly enough, as we were working on this project the neighbors kept coming by to see what was going on. I have to admit, we now have the nicest looking (and cleanest!) garage in the neighborhood. The next step: pick up a couple nice storage cabinets, placing them on a support system that will keep them 3-4 inches off of the ground to make cleaning of the garage easier. Now, when we want to clean the garage, we can just hose it down and squeegee out the water. Genius!
Downside: we now have to wait two days before we can walk on it, and a week before we can park in our garage once again. No biggie. It’s a small price to pay for having a finished garage.
