This is the Epic Urban Homestead garage.
And it's kind of nothing right now. The reason why is because I really want
to make this a space that I can build projects, I can hang out, I can design to be the ultimate thing
that I use to build the stuff for the Garden and the Homestead. But to do that, there are a lot of things
that need to change. And the first thing I want
to change is the floor. Let me show it to you right now. So
the floor out here is just concrete. They painted some of it. But in here they've sort of
skim-coated it with some more concrete and it's really
rough. Catches dirt like crazy, it's hard to get it out of there and
it just doesn't look that clean to me. And I do want this to be just
like the perfect workspace. And so what I'm doing is I'm
hiring a team to come out and grind this down to be nice and smooth. And then they're going to coat it
with what's called Polyaspartic. So in this video, I'm going to take you through the entire
process of how they grind it down and how they coat it. Polyaspartic,
for those of you who don't know, is basically like epoxy,
but it's even better. It does not yellow in UV light and it has
a lot more resistance to anything sort of dropping on it. And I'm probably
going to be dropping stuff in here, especially as I'm pretty new to building
stuff. So the team's about to come. I will take you along on the process. Cultivate that Like button
and let's get into it. The first thing that the team had to do
was see how much of this weird top coat of cement they could chip off. Now, when Paul from Perkins Custom
Coatings came out to quote this job, he didn't know if that
could be removed easily. And so he said it might
be a bit of a crazy job, even though it's a small garage.
And I said, you know what, let's still give it a
go and see what happens. But fortunately you could see the team
is not having too big of a problem just chipping this off. So I think
what happened is the remodelers, when they came into the house, they just wanted to cover
up the old garage floor, make it look a little more salable -
which they did because I bought it. But you know it, in the end, was kind of
a sloppy job. And so they chip it away. Now, as these chips came off, we actually came across a
potential problem with a wet spot. Like this dark spot
here. Yeah, exactly. So you think there's like water underneath
that's? There's something underneath. Could be a lot of moisture.
So yeah, I mean that, that explains why it lifted up so
much because. Because it's not sealed. Not that it's not sealed but it just, the
moisture makes everything like pop up. A patch here or anything that you
may use makes it pop right up. So that explains why, in this area, it
came off really easy. Like over there, you see how it's not so wet? Yeah. And it didn't come off
as easy as it did here. And you can tell it's wet here just cause
of discoloration. Yeah you can just. Look if you touch it you just, you can
tell there's moisture. Oh, look at that. Yeah. Like it's not wet to the touch
necessarily, but it's definitely not dry. It's not like this over here. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, that's dry for sure. That's dry for sure. I wonder
what would be causing that though. After identifying the wet spot, I was a little bit worried as to if that
would add a lot of time or expense to the job. But the job continued for
that day with the initial grind. And so they use these really intense
machines with diamond-plated blades that kind of spin around really, really fast and just make short
work of cement or concrete. And so they just go straight through.
Now what's interesting about this again, is this is a small job for a team
like this. They'll do big warehouses, they'll do huge resorts, things like that. But this small little garage still
did some damage on these plates, which they erode anyways. That's the
nature of the game when you're grinding. But we ground through a full set of
plates with only half the garage. Day one is complete and there
were a few issues. Number one, they had to hammer and chip off the
entire skim coat of cement that had that paint on top of it. I think that was just a cosmetic thing
that the flippers did and THEN get into the grind. And so on the grind, it's
still actually not completely level. There's quite a bit of grinding probably
left to do. It just took a while. And it was really uneven, probably some
really old concrete here. Fortunately, not a lot of cracking, but
just like way off balance. Went through a couple of the pads on the
grinder really quickly. And they said, normally that takes at least
a thousand square feet. This is nowhere near a
thousand square feet. So some really big differences in
the elevation. But another problem, that I'm actually sitting on right now, is a little bit of moisture buildup right
here that we're not exactly sure how much of a problem that will be.
Cause if there's moisture here, then the coating that you put
down, it won't adhere as well. And so you could get this little pocket
where the coating just ends up coming up or looking deformed or something. So I guess we'll stay tuned until next
time they come out to see what happens right here. As we move into day two, Brandon from Perkins Custom Coatings
came out to take a look at that wet spot and see if it was going to cause
any serious problems in the job. And fortunately he found
out that it wasn't really a moisture issue. It was more the fact that whoever owned
this house in the past had probably decades worth of oil just dripping
onto one spot that was seeping its way through the concrete.
So fortunately he said, that's an easier thing to fix because
they can scrape it away and then torch off the rest. Day two commenced
with more grinding down. But then they also had to torch
that oil, like I mentioned before. It's a pretty simple process. You're basically just trying to burn
it off and suck that oil up out of the concrete so that there's
no moisture there. So that when you actually do the
coating, which we'll see later, it doesn't just de-laminate right away.
As day three of the process began, it really was more about getting
the floor nice and level. And so they used some leveling
compound here that sets really quickly, and then they can then grind it one
final time to smooth off those levels. And so this is mostly
filling in the low spots. It was really cool to see because it
set super fast and they could just spot treat certain areas based
on how low they were. Now, this wasn't a laser-leveled
concrete floor, but it's going to be level to
about an eighth of an inch or so. And so there's not going to
be a whole lot of waviness. And getting a laser level out here or
using self-leveling concrete would just be a totally different part
of the job that honestly, it's a little bit overkill
for what I'm looking for. The final grinding phase is now going on
here. You can see they're going at it. And this is just to grind off any
lips that have been created from the leveling compound to do
a final smoothing pass. And then they'll come back and do a
tiny little bit of spot treating on any final little bits of leveling
and do one final grind. And then they go into the base
coat stage, which is really cool. Now what's interesting about
this company, quite frankly, and they didn't pay me to say this,
I paid full price for this job, is the level of detail. There are so many different steps
that I think other people would skip in prepping this floor.
Most of the job is the prep. I would say almost all of
it in fact is the prep. And it's really cool to see the
level of detail they put in this. Now that we are finally at the step
where we can put a base coat down, it's just an epoxy base. And the reason why is because epoxy is
basically the best style of base coat that you can put down. The polyaspartic is what comes after
the base coat and the chipping, which you're going to see in a
second. So right now, I don't know, after watching the whole process, watching the epoxy get rolled on
and this nice smooth coat go over the top of the garage floor is
just such a satisfying feeling. I said satisfying and the most
satisfying part is right now. I chose the coastal blue
paint chips to spread over. And they wear these awesome spike shoes
so that they don't mess up the base coat that they just walked on. So kind of a cool little trick
of the trade right there. But what they'll do
now is just toss chips. And they'll put about 70 pounds of
paint chips on the surface of this base coat while it's still wet so
it adheres to the base coat. And then the next day they come back
and they'll actually blow out probably 30 pounds of those chips and recover them. But they overchip it to make sure that
a hundred percent of that surface is covered. What you're seeing happen here is
blowing away the chips to paint the outer edge. Now the outer edge is the area
which the garage door does NOT cover. So it's basically the line where
the garage door hits the garage floor. The reason why they paint that a solid
color is because it's exposed to the light because it's outside of the garage. And if you were to put chips on that and
do it the exact same way as the rest of the garage, the chips outside would actually
discolor faster than the chips inside. So it would look off. And so what they do is they preemptively
solve that problem by creating a solid color, basically
just the base coat. And they'll put the base coat
down, very delicately paint that, they'll sprinkle some sand on top of
that base coat because without the chips, it actually is quite slick. And so
they'll sprinkle a couple layers of sand, they'll re-base coat that, let that dry. And then they'll come back tomorrow
for the final coat of everything. We are here at the final
day of this process. Can I tell you how excited I am
to show you guys the end result! So the first thing they do is they
sweep up all of the chips that are just sitting on the surface. Remember, they overchipped it to make sure
that everything got covered. And after that they come in with a
scraper and just make sure that they get off any uneven rough
spots because remember, we're still putting on the polyaspartic
coating at the very end here. And you don't want to put
it over a rough surface. So they spend a good amount
of time chipping, scraping, and then vacuuming up all the chips,
which do get reused, which is really cool. Now that the scraping is complete we're
at the point where we can finally put on the polyaspartic clear coat. So
you can see them mixing it here. It's very particular. It's a two
part mixture much like the epoxy. So you have to be very, very precise in
how you do this. If you mix it wrong, either it's too tacky or it just doesn't
even set up in the correct way that we need to have this nice
strong floor coating. So what they do is they come around the
side edges and they'll put that together first. And then they come in with a roller
and put in more around the sides. And then finally they'll take
a squeegee and a larger roller to apply it to the rest of the
floor as evenly as possible. Again, using those spike shoes
to get the job done. And then the final final step is to
remove the tape and on this outer edge that we talked about earlier, they're going to coat it with one more
layer of the epoxy base coat to really seal in that grit. So that you don't slip on that outer
little skirt to the garage that's outside the garage door when it closes. So now it's time for what you've all
been waiting for. The final product! Here we are sitting on the new
polyaspartic coated garage floor. I could not be happier about this! I
can even see a little bit of the shine, almost a reflection, almost
mirror-esque. As you can see, I've already moved in some workbenches. I've got a little rowing machine over
here, my Indo board balance trainer. And it feels like a garage now. Now what's funny is you put this floor
in and then all of a sudden these sides of the garage look a little
bit not finished. And in
fact, they aren't finished. As you can see the studs
are here. So later on, I'm going to be probably dry walling
this up and fixing up some of the electrical. I only have
two outlets in here. But I'm really excited about this
floor. The guys did an amazing job. I became more or less
obsessed with the process, almost in a "how it's made"
or a "dirty jobs" kind of way. And I hope you enjoyed following
along on the journey. All the info, if you're looking for this type of service
and you're in the Southern California area, will be down in
the video description. I could not recommend these
guys enough. As you saw, they went really above and beyond as
far as their prep work and all that. So thank you so much for watching. Good luck in the garden and the
homestead and keep on growing.
