How to Epoxy Coat a Garage Floor | This Old House

[Music] well one of the first things we're going to do is we're going to apply some water just to make sure that there's not a cure and seal on here looks like it's sort of soaking in does that tell us we don't have a sealer correct i'm spraying water on the floor right now just to make sure everything's getting absorbed i can see right away that the water is pulling away in this area here and we need to spot degrease this and if you could put some degreaser on here i'll continue spraying the floor looking for some more problem areas any uh concerns just washing this degreaser off into the driveway no this is a biodegradable product it's environmentally friendly and we should have no problems now that we've degreased surf floor our next step is we're going to acid etching acid so i guess that explains the rubber boots gloves and goggles you've outfitted us with correct this is the acid yes it is in this particular case we add one of these to two gallons of water we are going to use a plastic sprinkling can that's important because we don't want to use metal acid reacts with metal and we want to make sure our floor is damp so that the acid has a chance to flow out the acid is reacting with the surface of the concrete and it's allowing us to have some good mechanical adhesion now that we've finished acid etching we're just going to rinse whatever dirt or loose particles were created and get the floor clean again so no concerns about rinsing the acid out into the driveway no that acid has all reacted with the concrete and has become a salt when the acid reacts with the concrete it leaves little tiny particles of grip behind so we're going to use this wet vac to remove those off the surface how's that floor feel brian feels real good and dry so just how dry do we need it before we put the epoxy down well the floor should be completely dry next step is we mix our epoxy together an epoxy comes in two parts a part a and a part b you need to mix the two of them together for that chemical reaction occur mix it well wait 30 minutes and we're ready for application so 30 minutes to set up and now we can paint and how long do we have to work with it the epoxy has two to two and a half hours of pot life that's why we don't want to mix up any more than we need to ahead of time whenever painting a floor it's a good idea to work in approximately a two feet deep by six foot wide area and then use your finishing strokes in a perpendicular direction so brian what do you think i think it looks great you know one coat does look good but if we put two down it's gonna look fabulous i think we should let this dry come back tomorrow and put down a second so doug did we have a good night for drying yes we did kevin all right well let's see how it looks hey good morning brian morning can i walk on it absolutely all right brian what do you think i think it's definitely an improvement for what we had it does look good but i can see a few places where it's a little bit thin and not quite as uniform as it could be so second coat yeah a second coat will take care of these problems and there's something else we can do to dress this floor up even more as a decorative effect we have these color flakes that we can add to the finished floor system they help hide some of these imperfections in the floor plus they give us a very nice look floor needs a second coat but not the walls brian we've got enough painted here now that it's time to start putting the color flakes down it's important to put the color flakes down into the epoxy while it's still wet so we have good adhesion how does that look brian i think that looks really good that looks like a good job [Music]

Channel: This Old House

Views: 3,833,168

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, how-to, Episode, TV Show, garage floor, epoxy, Do It Yourself kevin o'connor, doug fasching, stain resistant, Kevin o’connor, kevin o'connor house, kevin o'connor this old house, kevin o'connor ask this old house, kevin o'connor interview

Id: wBeUWXvK0nU

Length: 4min 2sec (242 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 11 2014