Learn How To Prep Concrete Floors Like The Pros For Metallic Epoxy Install | Start To Finish

welcome to lagari everyone learn how to prep your concrete like a pro in this video we'll walk you through this step-by-step process on how to prep your floor before installing an epoxy floor kit if you're not already a lagari subscriber hit that red button so you don't miss out on any of our new videos now let's get started alright guys I'm gonna go over all the prep tools that you want to use to do diamond grinding prepping your surface if you guys are gonna wind up grinding the actual concrete so behind me we have a few options so if you have a smaller floors you guys can get all this stuff at Home Depot these angle grinders it's just an angle grinder and then they also have the diamond wheels and then also dust shroud so you can get this full set up at Home Depot and then they also have the smaller 1/4 inch one same thing angle grinder diamond cup wheel and then the dust buddy of the dust shroud so and this hooks up to a vacuum really simple really good for minimizing dust and stuff because you do create a lot of dust when you're grinding so we'll typically you know on a large garage like this will typically use that for the edges and then maybe the little guy to get into nice small areas and we always connect those two vacuums to minimize the dust and then right here you can rent these walk-behind grinders these are these are great for larger floors obviously grinding by hand is kind of a pain so bigger projects bigger garages whatever you guys are doing you can rent these from Home Depot most rental places rent the actual concrete walk-behind grinders and then this is just a vacuum a heavy duty vacuum to go to the floor grinders because it create a lot more dust so these are great we got both of these from a rental company like I said you can call around tell them what you're doing they'll set you guys up and then if you guys are doing like you know the small angle grinders with the dust shrouds you can also just use a rigid vac and get a filter and make sure you get a bag in there also that bag is gonna keep the filter from getting clogged and you'll be able to vacuum for long periods of time without having to replace the filter you just put a new bag in real simple so these are kind of the options for prep and again you know these are you can grind floors with this by hand just takes longer obviously larger ones you want to use something like a walk-behind grinder and then always have a vacuum to minimize the dust and again you can get these dust strategies they're called dust buddies from Home Depot I think Lowe's even has those few other options for prepping your floors again like I said before there's a lot of options for prepping whether it's acid etching you know walk behind grinder angle grinder diamond cut wheels but these two things worked really great probably our most favorite and the most aggressive the most used in like commercial industrial settings for achieving that the best bond that you can get is using a shop blaster now these are really great they only do small passes so you obviously got to do a lot of passes on larger projects but these work absolutely amazing and they also will remove the sealer off your concrete if you have sealer as well so it'll remove the sealer and prep this concrete surface at the same time so we really like these this right here is a floor sander and it's called a diamond brush attachment it has these blades here these work great for removing like carpet glue sealer stuff like that it doesn't heat the sealer or the carpet glue up and just smear it it kind of just peels it off slowly so it works great so I'm gonna show you guys both of these in action now Home Depot rents these diamond brush attachments and floor sander so Home Depot will rent you guys this stuff and then some belt rentals rinse the the shot blaster the walk-behind grinder so in there nationwide so cost call Sunbelt Rentals see if they haven't stock if they don't have it in stock they can get it there so call ahead of time right plan out your project get everything dialed in reserve your machines that you want to use and then you'll be dialed in but I recommend doing the shot blaster that's going to be the fastest way especially if your concrete's sealed now if you're gonna do a walk behind grinder it's nice to remove the sealer with the diamond brush first it'll help the grinder get to the concrete a lot faster but I'll show you guys both of these in action and again you can kind of make your pick but our preference our the thing that we like to use the best is the shop blaster or the walk behind grinder and then obviously hate your edges with the smaller diamond cut wheels we want to show you how to make what's called like a termination point or a termination joint at the edge of your garage so it's never good to just stop the coating and then have kind of what we would call like a trip edge or just like a high edge now inside a house a lot of times it's easy because you can do tile on top of it or it's going underneath the trim or underneath carpet but out here in the garage if we just stop the epoxy right here and it's high that end is going to take a lot of damage and it's more prone to chipping off now we don't have them chip off a lot but you definitely could people are scraping of snow you're just gonna get right under that and that blunt force there's a lot of pressure on that so what we're going to do is we're going to cut into the concrete just a little bit just enough maybe a quarter of an inch eighth of an inch just enough to get some epoxy down in there so it acts a lot like rebar so to give you an idea if I have my concrete here and I just cut a little slit this is the width of a blade if I run my epoxy all the way to this edge and it fills this in now this edge even though it's still kind of like a trip edge it's anchored down into the concrete with all of this so a lot of times what happens is people just have their concrete slab and then they put tape here like we're going to show you and then the epoxy will just stop right here and it'll run the risk of just chipping right off and even delaminating continuously so the idea is that we're gonna cut into the concrete and we're gonna run the epoxy to the other edge that and fill this in it acts a lot like a rebar where if you want to chip this edge out you have to chip it all of this out not just a little piece sitting on top of the concrete so I hope that makes sense I will show you don't be intimidated by this at all this is so easy this is just a cheap grinder from from now you can get them at Walmart this way I don't remember exactly where we got this but you can even buy these for like 30 or 40 bucks these little concrete diamond you know cutting wheels these are cheap as well and we're just going to see this a little bit into the concrete and just follow some tape just to give ourselves a termination points very easy but we want to do it underneath the concrete door the goal is is when this concrete door is shut from the inside you see your beautiful floor and from the outside it's just regular concrete so we want that termination point to be right in the middle of the door so the easiest way to do that it is the first thing we're going to do is actually close the door just to find out where the edge of the door is so what I'm going to do far is I'm just gonna look at this seal and I'm gonna put the tape Oh dirty better I'm gonna put the tape right there at the edge of the seal I'm gonna do the same thing on this side they do one in the middle and now I kind of know where our lines at so at this point it's really easy we just want to move about a half inch on the inside of that tape and you can obviously get help to do this I'll have Tyler stand on that we'll pull it tight obviously you don't have to eyeball it you can measure it so right here that is definitely anywhere from a quarter inch to a half inch underneath the door so now I don't need to pull this tape I can actually just leave it I don't need to do a chalk line I will actually cut on the edge of that tape and then I'll pull the tail and this is just to make sure there's a lot of longevity right at the edge of our floor we don't want we don't want it to begin to chip off from this outside edge and this outside edge is the part that's most prone to damage so I've got a vacuum we're gonna be able to just somebody can just walk behind me they'll follow me with the vacuum and I'll cut with that wheel so some things you want safety glasses or the cool sunglasses ear protection facemask you don't want to breathe the concrete desk go on you don't want anything just shooting your eyes and the tools are kind of loud so save it first okay as you can see this didn't take long maybe a minute to cut this and a couple tricks so you can you know have a white piece of metal or something metal and have somebody stand on it and just run along and trace that line if you want to make it easy we have a pretty steady hand we've been doing this a while but the other trick is if you just want to free him it's not hard the key is that you've got to sink it down into the concrete just a little bit otherwise that blade just kind of bounces around on the surface so the trick is to sink it into the concrete and then just move it slowly and there's it's very easy to control at that point so regardless of what you want to do you don't have to do these termination cuts like this you know thousands of people haven't but it's definitely something we recommend to really minimize that edge of it which is more prone to damage so that's an option to help you guys with the front of your floor you we'll go into showing you guys we've already started the edges and you can see we're only going out about four inches on our edges because the walk-behind machine will get you know pretty close but you can tell the difference from grinding versus the hard trialed concrete so we're trying to get down to the aggregate we want to get rid of this cream layer we're gonna get an amazing bond with our primers and epoxies if we can get past this cream layer so that's kind of the idea of getting down to the aggregate removing that cream layer and those concrete diamond cut wheels are what's gonna do it and the walk-behind grinder so we'll go into showing you how we grind right now and I'll show you a few tips with the angle grinder when I'm grinding with this angle grinder if you hold it flat it can take a little bit longer to grind cuz most concrete's not perfectly flat there's kind of lows and highs in it so I'll tilt it up I'll put my hand here apply a little pressure and I'll tilt it up just a little bit you don't want to tilt it up a lot just barely enough to where the majority of the pressure is on the front edge and that's gonna grind through a lot faster because you can see I held it flat here and we got a low spot low spot so what I'll do is you can grind spots like that and then I'll tilt it up a little just a tad bit and I'll hit these low spots and they'll grind those right out so edges go really fast if you tilt it and kind of just grind it and move it on we just don't want to gouge the surface and you see how pretty flat it is right that's kind of what we're looking for we want it nice and smooth and flat and then when you guys stop the grinder you don't want to just let go of the trigger and let go cause it's gonna gouge out the concrete so just let off the trigger once it stops let go but that's pretty much it pretty simple process it is a little more time-consuming when you're grinding by hand but some of these jobs it's kind of necessary so again best way to prep concrete grinder or an actual shop blaster and you can even sub or hire you know someone to come in and prep your slab concrete for you as well if you don't want to do that you can call around most guys will come in and they'll grind you know prep your your surface for you before you do the actual coating so we'll go into showing you how we grinded the edges how we grinded the patcher paste and that's going to be next you you all right so now I'm gonna show you guys how to run the walk-behind grinder we do have it attached to the vacuum so we're gonna minimize a lot of the dust very simple it's gonna just kind of do its own thing we're just gonna kind of move it around it's typically gonna just glide on the surface easy to move and I'll show you guys the process so we're gonna get everything turned on and then you'll see basically what we're looking for when we're doing a walk behind grinder so you can obviously tell right here we have the hand grinder we did with the cup wheel so this will be a little bit different it won't be as aggressive but we do want to still scuff it up best we can to get rid of this smooth hard child layer again like I said before you're not gonna get the profile you will with the seven-inch angle grinder it's just a lot more rowdier you know grinds are conquered a lot more but you can see what we're getting it's just taking off that cream layer really scratching up the surface so obviously the better you grind the better you're gonna bond this you're gonna get but typically we're looking for something like this and it does depending on you know some concrete will grind a little better than others and this does have a sealer on it so it is taking a little bit to get through the sealing surface and I'll show you guys how to tell if your concrete sealed you can just take water drip a little on the concrete if it just kind of beads up and doesn't soak in typically that means you have some type of sealer on your cement so that will take a little more to work to grind that off and then get through the concrete so obviously very easy process it can be a little time-consuming but it's a lot better than being on your hands and knees grind them with the 7 inch grinder and you can also hire companies to come out and prep your slabs for you as well a lot a lot of companies will come grind it they'll shop glasses stuff like that so that is another option obviously there's no dust extraction tools for this so it can't get a little dusty so if you're doing lots of area wear a mask wear respirators stuff like that I'm just going to show you how it works and then I'll go on to the shop blaster and this is relatively loud so you are going to want to wear some ear protection but it's basically just going to start spinning on the floor and you'll start to see some chunks of sealer flip off and then I'll grab some of that and show you guys what that looks like so as you can see and it's shooting this stuff all over the floor but this is the sealer that is peeled off but it didn't like gum it up and start smearing it around so this works great for removing sealers without heating it up and gumming it up same thing with carpet glue stuff like that this works really well so I'll go a little bit more for you and these do have diamond pads on them so some guys will actually you know prep their concrete floors with this it is gonna take a lot longer but you can tell it's starting to once it gets through that sealer it'll start to scuff that concrete up similar to you know a couple grinder or a concrete grinder but again this is gonna take a lot longer the fastest thing is a walk-behind grinder and then the the best thing to use again is that shop blaster so I'll show you guys the strop blaster now and you'll be able to see the difference the SHA blaster will eat right through the the sealer and prep the concrete just like if we were to grind it by hand so very awesome tool to use alright so here's the shop blaster it takes shot shot blasting beads which you fill in here they're just like metal beads and they should you'll you'll get this with when you guys rent the machine you'll get a bag of beads or a couple to putting on your project so you would dump the beads into here and then we're gonna hook a vacuum attachment up to here and this is set up to where it doesn't suck the beads up out of here it collects the dust and it's still gonna suck up some of the beads but down in here is where it's sucking out its the metal contraption here makes it so it doesn't suck all the beads out which is really cool and then so I'm gonna hook a vacuum up to this we obviously have the big vacuum you can use the shop back the shop back just make sure you have the bags in there like I was saying before so you can hook the vacuum up there that's going to minimize the dust and this thing's pretty loud so you will want to wear ear protection and all we're gonna do is once I turn this on the beads aren't going to shoot out until I pull this trigger up so once I pull this trigger up I want to start moving and depending on you know how hard your concrete is you might be able to move a little faster than I am this is some really hard concrete and it has sealer on it too so it's going through the sealer and prepping the surface so I'll kind of show you how that works so you can see how amazing this works right this is where we grinded by hand and then this is the Shah blasts the same exact profile and if you're getting your garages with this type of profile you're never gonna have an issue with delamination I mean this is the best thing that you can do to a concrete surface prior to an epoxy floor and if you were gonna hire a professional contractor it's going to charge you know 10 to 12 bucks a square foot maybe even more depends on your project that's the type of stuff that they're gonna do they're gonna shop less they're gonna get it like that so so you guys getting your floors like that is the way to go for sure so that's why we like using the shop blaster and again this is our our most favorite walk-behind grinders next and then obviously you know small projects you can do with the cup wheel and the angle grinder by hand but again bigger stuff garages these things work great few things on this machine we can reuse these beads just clean them up we can dump them back in there you might get a couple times of reusing these beads until they don't work as good and then the other thing you don't want to just pull this trigger and let this thing sit there cuz it'll just dig a hole in the cement like a gouge in the cement so always be moving it right I always have this thing movement when this thing is running and the faster you go the less it's going to do so just kind of see you know the profile that it's leaving again some concrete's gonna you're gonna be able to go a little faster on this is some really hard concrete so and having that sealer on it's gonna take a little bit longer but this is the type of profile we're looking for and then obviously you know we'll show you guys how to clean stuff up and get it all clean before we do the actual epoxy but those are the machines to use we're gonna do the whole garage with the shop blaster get the whole profile like this so we can see that the aggregate and we're not gonna have any issues with delamination or bonding this is going to create a really awesome bond with our epoxy coatings you you all right so you guys saw me hit this little area here I swept up the the beads and I poured those back into the shop blaster because again we can reuse those I took out any big chunks or anything like that so what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna go around in a spot hit any of these spots that I can tell that weren't hit very well these these are typically low spots in the cement that might take two passes or so we want to get the majority of the whole area to look like right here so I'm gonna go spot hit this this section will be done and then we'll go to a square I'll do the whole square from start to finish and we'll we'll figure out how long that takes and you guys will see that full process and then you'll be able to we'll be able to tell you you know how long a typical 750 square foot garage would take to shop last and prep it like this just keep in mind when when the beads are on the ground it can be a little slippery so just be cautious of that so this is done so I'm going to pick a whole new square we're gonna do the whole thing on it and we'll tell you how long that takes alright guys so I got the this square completely done I went one way the first pass and then I cross shot blasted the next pass and the profile is absolutely beautiful like I said if you hire a professional company that's all they do is prep concrete this is what they're going to get it to look like absolutely beautiful and this is the most aggressive profile that you can basically get for the bond that you want with the metallic epoxy so perfect perfect surface prep here and this took us this was 115 square feet it took us a half an hour to get it like this so both passes per hour you guys can expect to get about 230 square feet per hour so that's quite a bit it's fast it's basically dust free if you put the the vacuum attachment on there so it's an awesome product to use awesome machine so expect about an hour of shop less you're gonna do about 230 square feet so this garage is 780 square feet so if we were just to start this garage it would take us about 3.3 hours so it doesn't take long to prep and especially if you're getting a surface profile like this so this is exactly what we want and again we showed you guys multiple options on how to prep we recommend the shop blaster Sunbelt Rentals rinse them and they're nationwide should call them make sure you call them ahead of time right make sure they have it in stock if they don't have it stocked and get it from another they get it from another one of their companies they'll just ship it to their location and then you guys can pick that up so this is great to have and again just hook a rigid vacuum up to it have a bag in that vacuum with the filter and it's gonna do just as good as a big actual industrial grade backing so I want to show you guys the difference so this square was grinded by hand and you guys saw us shop blast this square so this square took a half an hour this square took an hour and a half to do by hand so obviously the shop laughs is a way to go it's not gonna you know be a pain in the butt you're simply walking behind a machine but it gives you even grind and it gives you a similar profile so if you come and look so we're getting a similar profile it's not as even as the shop Lester is but we're down to the aggregate we don't have any cream layer there might be a couple of spots that we want to hit but again these are the options right so it's the concrete grinder by hand smaller projects you know that works great obviously the garage larger projects rent the shop blaster it's it's relatively cheap for what you're going to be able to achieve as far as prep wise and they're readily available at a Sunbelt Rentals so those are the two differences and you can see grinded and shop lasting it's just a lot more even of a profile doesn't create as much dust all right guys got it all cleaned up we're reusing the beads and you can see how nice it looks sha blaster versus diamond grind again less dust less mess and it's a lot more efficient faster and another little tip for you guys is you can get those magnetic rollers wheels for picking up like nails and stuff from construction sites and these beads are magnetic so you can pick the remainder of the beads up when you're done so that's probably what we'll do is we'll finish shop lasting we'll grab our our magnetic wheel thing we'll run it over the floor pick the majority of the the beads left up and then we'll probably blow everything into a corner and then vacuum the rest up to kind of clean the beads because you want to make sure we get all these beads cleaned up because it's gonna you know obviously would be like debris in the epoxy when we coated it you alright guys we got the floor basically prepped so now what we want to do is clean it so you can rent these at almost any rental store I think Home Depot rents them also so it's just an auto scrubber or a floor scrubber floor cleaner it's basically what you guys see driving around like Walmart and stuff or Home Depot cleaning the floor so what it does it has a scrubber on the front puts water out so it'll put water out on this scrubber and then as I'm going the squeegee on the back here will suck that water up now these are vital because we don't want to induce the concrete with a bunch of water so this basically scrubs it and vacuums it up immediately and it so it doesn't get right to the edges so I have the mop here so I'll be how I like to do it I'll go around the perimeter as far as I can go I don't really have a long cord here but I'll do as much as I can on the edges and then I'll mop the edges in and then once I get the perimeter done and mop I just have to focus on the middle of the floor now if your floor is really dirty say you grind it a lot the best way to check is run your hand across it if you're getting like a white film on your on your hand you probably should hit it again or say it dries and you see like white streaks and stuff you want to hit that again so I'll show you guys the process but again the biggest thing is we don't want to soak the concrete with water before we put our epoxy down and we we recommend doing this a day or two before you're actually going to lay the epoxy that way the concrete can dry out so we're gonna hit this now and it's Thursday and we'll probably coat this garage probably Monday just kind of how it's working out but the longer you can wait right let that concrete dry out the better but it's good to have an auto scrubber instead of pressure washing because you're just gonna be soaked in the concrete with water but again if that's your last resort we've had a lot of guys pressure wash garages let them dry out for a few days and then coat without any issues so I'll kind of show you how this works you know obviously machines are different but they usually have the amount of water you can put down I usually I usually go at three three three droplets that's the max water it's going to put down now if you're getting just a lot of excess drop that down to two and try that so that's what these are for usually and then this is obviously the vacuum and then this is the scrubber but again some machines are different but that's how you you would use this one all right so I like to hit my edges and then mop mop the edges whether the water is still wet and I can already tell this is gonna need another pass I can kind of see some some spots in it so we'll just take the mop we're just trying to get as close to that edge as we can make sure you getting your corners good and that's basically the process but if you look you can kind of see random dirty spots in the floor like right here so we hit that one more time this floor should be perfectly clean so that's kind of the process auto scrub and hits your edges and if you have someone helping you they can do your mop your edges while you're using the auto scrubber but yeah hit your edges mop it up and then just go back and forth and you noticed I had my cord on the right side and I kept weaving back and forth that way I didn't have to move the cord every time so if you're gonna start here and work your way out of the garage make sure you're plugged in like on this side of the wall get a couple feet on this side done on your edges also and then just go back and forth and you're not gonna have to move your cord every time so you just go back and forth the cord will always be behind you if you do it if you don't do it like that you're gonna be fighting the cord going under it pulling it over you it's kind of a pain in the butt so it's a nice little legardie tip for you so we'll finish this up and then it's basically ready for epoxy so we'll show you guys that next and another thing we grinded the stem walls just knocking down any imperfections or chunks that were on it so you obviously want to clean that as well and I mean you can just do that with your mop also just go around here clean those walls off so again the biggest thing is prep is key and also getting the floor clean once you're done creating a lot of dust and debris and stuff so really take your time at this point make sure it's nice and clean and then obviously we like to blow the rooms out a few times before we actually put the epoxy down so we'll finish this up and show you guys the next step [Music] you

Channel: Leggari Products

Views: 469,125

Keywords: epoxy, floorcoverings, stonecoatcountertops, countertopepoxy, epoxyfloors, DIY, homeremodel, concretefloor, garage transformation, garage, how to prep garage floor for installation, how to prep floor before installation, how to prep floor, floorprep, concrete grinding, grinding floor, leggari products, epoxy floor, leggari, coating, how to diamond grind, epoxy garage floor, concrete prep, epoxy floor preperation, diy epoxy floor, floor maintainer, concrete floor grinding, epoxy concrete

Id: 7GTGnX_IMuw

Length: 42min 3sec (2523 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020