New Garage Epoxy Floor || DIY Professional Grade

today on shop nation we give an update to my 20 year old garage floor by adding a very high quality epoxy coating what's up you guys i'm travis this is shop nation and this is my new house now this house has a three-car garage as you can see behind me and today we're going to be coating the floor with epoxy now if you remember from my old shop i did an epoxy floor in that one as well off camera before i started the channel and i really liked having the floor coated for that floor i did it myself and i used sort of a cheap option but the results were largely okay that is until i tried to move i found out that the epoxy that i used just wasn't quite as durable as maybe it should have been so now fast forward to today and i'm looking for solutions to coat this garage floor and after doing a lot of research i've come to the conclusion that you basically get what you pay for so if i want to put a really stout epoxy floor in this garage i'm gonna have to look at different options now if you do a quick search on youtube you'll find a ton of videos of a ton of different products and tons of different ways to do epoxy floors so it can be a bit confusing but after kind of weeding through all of that i came across ligari products now ligari is the sponsor of today's video but that was only after i found them and realized that that was going to be my best option so in this video i'm going to highlight the basic steps to put on a really high performance epoxy coating in a garage now this isn't a tutorial all right there are way better videos out there that do that even specifically from ligari so if you want to learn about all the individual steps like preparation base coat top coat whatever coat whatever you want to see it's already on there my goal in this video is to kind of show you my process of doing it and hopefully good results as well now the first step for any epoxy product is always going to be preparing your concrete now back when i did it in my old shop the only preparation i did was an acid etch the main reason for doing that was because it was a brand new house so i didn't have set in oil stains i didn't have concrete sealer it was raw concrete that was already pretty porous as it was so i think i can get away with doing an acid edge with this house however it's 20 years old and has all of the kind of baked in oil stains that you would come to expect in a garage so for that reason i need to use something a little bit more aggressive so i'm going to use a shot blaster which basically just pelts the surface of the concrete with little metal bbs and exposes that aggregate and gives a really rough surface that the epoxy can then stick to now like you or anybody else for that matter we don't own a shop blaster so i just rented one from a local tool rental company so i'm gonna go figure out how to use that and then edit the video so it looks like i'm a professional okay so it turns out these things are pretty simple but there are a couple little things to get used to [Music] eventually though i did get the hang of it and you could actually see it start to work here you can see what it looks like going over some old oil stains it's kind of oddly satisfying kind of like mowing your yard except there wasn't a cup holder on this thing so that's kind of a bummer the process takes a while like several hours each pass is about eight inches wide and when you multiply that out across 750 square feet you better have some good audio books and podcasts heat up because and this is actual speed not even exaggerating what you can't hear is how loud this damn thing is too plus every once in a while you'll feel one of those little bbs shooting your shin which you know is neat just keep telling yourself it's worth it it's worth it nothing worth having is easy unless of course you pay someone to do this and then then it's totally worth it [Music] here you can see the difference between the old garage floor and the freshly blasted area it's noticeably more rough which is exactly what you're going for with the whole garage scuffed up i need to then add a groove into the concrete where i wanted my epoxy edge to end this groove helps anchor the epoxy coating so that the exposed edge doesn't get pulled up as things inevitably run into it [Music] then it is clean up time so it is so important to get the floor as clean as possible including all dust and debris [Music] once that was done i then cleaned the entire floor with some simple green concentrate if there was any oil grease or dirt left over this should take care of it now i gave my floor plenty of time to fully dry out you should technically do a moisture test on your concrete but ain't nobody got time for that now it's time to of course tape everything that you don't want the epoxy on another pro tip that i actually got from watching the ligari videos is to leave a gap between the tape and the floor what this does is prevent the tape edge from getting stuck in the epoxy and makes removal really [Music] easy [Music] [Music] so the first coat is actually a primer it's a relatively thin coat that's going to give the epoxy something to really bond with now you won't find this step in those cheap big box store epoxy kits all of the lagari products whether it's primer epoxy resin or the urethane top coat come in really easy to handle containers and makes mixing the right ratios a breeze even if you had to break this down to do a smaller area now with every coating i always start by cutting in the edges and the side walls and this is where having another set of hands would be really helpful because i was doing all of this myself now one thing that really stuck out to me and makes lagari products great is that the company was initially founded to help the average diy-er gain access to professional grade epoxy historically only the contractors could get the good stuff and consumers had to settle for kind of the average literally watered-down alternatives and all the products from ligari are also formulated to have low odor easy to mix and lots of working time sorry for the dark shots here but i had to keep moving regardless of the crappy light shortly after applying the primer i added the base coat of clear epoxy resin now once this stuff is mixed you have to get it out of the bucket asap because it's actually going to start to kick and heat up once it's spread out thin on the floor you have a ton of working time to get it rolled out evenly now there are definitely some key tools to use when doing a job like this like these spiked shoe adapters that let me walk on the wet epoxy i'll link everything i use for this job in the video description below once that was all rolled out i could immediately add the color flakes to the wet epoxy now i've learned that more is always better my last four i was a little chintzy on the flakes [Music] i gave the epoxy two days to harden until i came back and scraped the surface to remove the excess flakes now this may look like i'm ruining my brand new floor but it's an important step with all those extra flakes scraped off the floor i used a combination of a leaf blower and a vacuum to get all of them out of the garage before moving on to the next step [Music] once that was dry i can now add the urethane top coat this will protect the epoxy underneath from things like uv and scratches and adds a ton of wear resistance again this is not something that's usually included in one of those cheap kits [Music] so i'm going with a matte finish but there's also a gloss option if you want a little bit more shine in addition you can include friction additive to help prevent the surface from being slippery when wet [Music] with the final cure time done i can now remove all the taped edges to reveal the final product now this is where the anchoring groove came into play it really secures that edge [Music] [Music] i do need to go back and fix some of the old trim where the tape actually pulled off some of the paint i am absolutely thrilled by how this floor turned out it was a ton of work many long hours and late nights went into this thing what a transformation [Music] looks pretty good now this is one of those projects that might look daunting on the front end but once you do it oh my god is it worth it it's amazing how much cleaner your garage stays and how much easier it is to clean now that you have a coating like this so one of the first questions that i'm sure you're wondering is how much did it cost okay so let's quickly break down those costs if you're gonna do this yourself in general a good rule of thumb if using a high quality epoxy it's gonna cost anywhere from two dollars to two dollars and fifty cents per square foot for materials now one thing that i learned is that it's not just the cost of materials if you're doing it yourself it's also the cost of the equipment needed to do the work so during the first step where i prepared the concrete i used a shot blaster and a vacuum to rent that over the course of a couple days cost me about 400 now there are cheaper ways to potentially do this you can do what's called a diamond grind or use a special wheel in an angle grinder or a larger grinder and you go over the whole surface so you could potentially do that for cheaper if you had some of that equipment on hand the next set of costs was all of the consumables to apply the epoxy so what i mean by this would be buckets rollers gloves mixing containers stir sticks tape plastic all that stuff now this cost is obviously going to vary because some stuff you may already have on hand but assuming you have nothing i spent about 200 to 250 on that material so in total to do my three-car garage which is 750 square feet would have cost me about 2 300 i will also mention that because lagari is sponsoring this video they supplied me with the raw material itself which i am hugely grateful for now if you like to use a contractor to do this they're gonna charge anywhere from five to seven dollars a square foot but that's going to include the cost of materials now some might say holy crap i don't have twenty three hundred dollars to coat my floor and that might be the case and there are cheaper options out there but you have to understand that you are really getting what you're paying for the epoxy used in a system like this is 100 solids it goes on much thicker is much tougher and when you add on the urethane top coat you have a surface that is so much stronger and less likely to pull up on things like hot tires as you're driving in and out of your garage i can now say that i've done both and yes you can save a pretty good chunk of change if you go with the cheap system but how much are you really saving if you're replacing it three years down the road so it's just something to think about thank you guys so much for watching and a big thanks to lagari for supporting this video and really diyers like us who want to do this to our own garage floor lagari has a great youtube channel that you should go check out if you want to go see all the crazy cool stuff you can do with their products and of course i'll link everything i used in this video in the video description below we'll do a real quick subscriber update if you're new to the channel this is something that i kind of like to do at the end of a lot of videos just to kind of show the growth of the channel and the community so far as of shooting today we're at ninety thousand six hundred and seven subscribers yes that means we crossed ninety thousand it's funny looking back when i started the channel i thought a hundred thousand was a pipe dream but maybe we'll get there that's gonna wrap up this video if you're not a subscriber consider subscribing i will catch you guys on the next project and as always continue to pursue shop greatness [Music]

Channel: Shop Nation

Views: 480,253

Keywords: shop nation, shopnation, epoxy floor, garage epoxy, garage floor coating, diy epoxy floor, diy garage epoxy floor, leggari epoxy flooring, garage flake floor, flake floor, epoxy flake flooring, floor coating, floor coating epoxy, garage shop, best garage floor coating, garage floor, garage flooring, epoxy coating

Id: Tx7eyZ71QJQ

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020