Archives October 2020

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Expensive garage floor epoxy coatings, are they worth it? Well, let’s talk about it.

The garage floor coating that you see right down here is from a company called Armor Epoxy. It’s a two-part, 100% solids garage floor epoxy coating, and it wasn’t cheap. So the question is, do I think it was worth it? Well, let’s talk about that.

When you decide to coat your garage floor, you’ve got a lot of different options. I mean, of course, you could not coat it at all. If you’re a commercial garage or you have a lot of vehicles coming in and out, or if you have a lot of square footage, coating it with something may be impractical or too expensive. You know, you’re going to drip a lot of oil and gas and other kinds of chemicals and stuff on there. You may just go ahead and leave it with the regular concrete floors. Nothing wrong with that.

But because my garage is a residential garage and the value of the house is somewhat impacted by the shape of the garage, I wanted to make sure that I put down something, some kind of coating. So my options were basically for paint, which is what was on here before, but it doesn’t hold up really well and it doesn’t look real great. So I don’t think I wanted floor paint. I didn’t want to have to paint it every two or three years and have it come up when I drove over it and these tire marks and that kind of stuff.

You can do epoxy, but there’s lots of different grades of epoxy. There’s the stuff that you can go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and get. It comes in a couple of cans with a kit to do a garage this size, probably 150 bucks. It comes with a little bag of flakes. You know, you could certainly do one of those. I’ve got a little bit of experience with that kind of a product. I’ve done a couple of projects with that in the past. It works okay, but the two projects that I’ve done didn’t really last very long. I got a couple of years out of them.

The one was sort of a back patio that was covered, so it wasn’t directly in the sunlight, but after two or three years, you started to see wear tracks in the coating from where people would come in and out of the back door, and it just started to sort of peel and flake right there. The other application was a garage with a vehicle that was simply parked. There was no work done in the garage at all. It just held the vehicle and some boxes. It’s held up better, but still after a few years, there’s some spots where it’s starting to peel.

So I didn’t want to have to come back and redo this floor every few years. I’m going to be doing an engine rebuild in here, doing my own oil changes, that kind of stuff. There’s no way that I’m not going to get chemicals and solvents on this floor, so I wanted something that was a little more durable than that.

And then once you get into the next level of things, you’re talking about do you do 100% solids epoxy? Are you going to do a polyaspartic polyurea? There’s all kinds of different options, and it really, it’s hard to do the research. I’m not gonna bore you with all that, but what I am gonna say is that I chose Armor Epoxy. It’s a 100% solids epoxy. It’s a kit that I got. It comes with the primer, but the kit that I got comes with epoxy primer, the two-part racing blue epoxy that you see here, the flakes it came with. I sprung extra for the military-grade top coat, and it also came with the installation kit, so you got a roller. Oh, you got the roller covers. You have to go out and buy your own roller, some mixing. You’re supposed to get some mixing buckets. I didn’t. That’s a story in two of itself, but generally, it comes with most of what you need.

I had to go out and buy spike shoes to throw the flakes down and a couple of other little things that you’re going to want to get that don’t come with the kit. So what I’m going to do is I’ve got some video of me before the floor went down talking about what I had to do to prep the garage for the floor because prep work is a big part. You have to make sure that you prep the floor correctly for else it won’t stick right and you’ll have bubbling or delamination, all kinds of trouble.

So I’ll talk a little bit about that. I’ll also have some garage security cam footage of me actually putting the floor down with my father-in-law, and you can kind of see what I went through and how it all went. Now unfortunately, I didn’t get the last day of me putting down the top coat. It’s kind of boring anyway. It’s just a clear coat. You can’t really even see what I was doing, but I lost that camera footage, so I don’t have that.

One thing I do want to note before you say anything is that I did wear a respirator on the last day. It took me two days to learn that lesson, and the primer was really, really bad in terms of the fumes. The actual epoxy, the two-part epoxy itself wasn’t bad at all, and then the top coat was probably the worst in terms of how bad the fumes were, but that was the day that I was wearing a respirator, so that was a good idea.

All right, so without further ado, take it away, past Ed.

In my garage right now, there’s not a whole lot to see, really. It’s kind of bare before the floor goes in. So I haven’t even really started my channel yet. This is kind of a pre-channel video, I guess. But I’m putting down Armor Epoxy this weekend. It’s Labor Day weekend 2020, and I don’t see a whole lot of reviews or a whole lot of videos online for the Armor Epoxy product. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, seen a lot of good things on like garagejournal.com and a few other places. So I want my garage floor to sort of stand up to, you know, doing an engine swap and gas and oil and all that fun stuff, so I decided to go ahead and, you know, drop the money on a real hardcore product. You know, I got the primer and I got the military-grade top coat and the whole bit, so we’re doing that this weekend. So when I’m done, I’ll come back and let you guys know how it went.

Right now, I’m gonna talk a little bit about the procedure that I did with the floor that I have to get it ready for this. Hopefully, hopefully it’s enough. They say that preparation is like 90% or something, so hopefully that’s true because I can prepare. I can’t paint very well, but I can prepare, so we’ll see how it goes.

All right guys, so let’s talk a little bit about what I had to do to this floor to get it ready for Armor Epoxy this weekend. As you can see now, the floor is really nice and clean and bare and ready, and it wasn’t that way, of course, when we bought the house a few years ago. There was a sort of bluish-gray paint on the floor, and I’m sure that garage floor paint is fine for most applications, but I really wanted something a little bit more durable than garage floor paint, something that could hold up to, you know, oil and gas and that kind of stuff, so I wanted epoxy.

Well, in order for epoxy to stick to a floor, it’s got to be nice and clean like this, so you got to get rid of the paint. And you got a few options. You can use chemicals and nasty stuff to try to get it up, or you can get that done on all fours with a hand sander, or you can go out and rent a tool. And what I did was I went out to Home Depot and I rented a floor buffer with an attachment, what’s called a Dima brush, and went and buffed the entire floor with the diamond brush. And you can see that, you know, it got up all the paint, and it took me all day long. It’s no joke. Morning to dusk, all day. It was one of the messiest things I’ve ever done in my entire life. There was dust everywhere. Dust went all throughout the house. There was a huge cloud of dust coming out my garage door. Please guys, if you’re gonna do this, wear a mask. You know, I’m not always the safest person, but I definitely wore a mask that day and probably saved my lungs. Wear ear plugs because it’s gross and nasty. Wear hearing protection for sure because it’s loud. Look, if you’ve got a hazmat Tyvek suit, put that on. It’s crazy.

All right, so but it did a good job. I got all the paint up, and one of the things that I had to do was I had to fill in these cracks. So I got my angle grinder with a diamond cut-off wheel for masonry, and I went through and chased all these cracks and opened them up a little bit so that I could fill them in with a product I found called PC Concrete. And PC Concrete is a two-part epoxy that is claimed to be stronger than concrete, and I believe it because if you look over here, I actually have a crack that’s forming right here, and that crack wasn’t there before, right? It’s actually new, but it’s in the concrete and not in the PC Concrete. So I do believe that that stuff is stronger than concrete.

But, you know, it’s okay. I mean, concrete cracks. It is what it is. But it works out real well, which I had to fill it in twice because the first application, everything would seep into the cracks, and so it would go just a little bit lower than flush, and then I had to fill it in again. And then once it was higher than flush, I could grind it off with a diamond grinding wheel, so that worked out good.

And here we are now. You can see a few splotchy places. What those are are some divots and low spots. Like, so for example, there was a couple of places where leaves had fallen onto the concrete when they poured the slab, and then, of course, they left the leaf impressions, which are pretty, but not what I wanted my garage for. So I went ahead and ground those out, filled them in with the same stuff, PC Concrete. Now it’s a much thicker application, which is why they’re darker colored, but I was able to get that done.

One thing to note, if you’re using a product like that and you’re using great big globs of it, is that when you’re using big globs and you’re kind of grinding them down with a diamond grinder, it tends to melt rather than grind, so you have to just be careful of your temperature and do just little bits at a time or else, yeah, it also melts and gets all nasty.

So once I got the floor kind of all cleaned up and ready to go, there was one still large issue that I had to contend with. Now you see this wall over here? That’s the wall that connects the garage to the house. Originally, they had just plopped this garage right up next to the house. This was not an original garage; they added it. And down here in the Southwest, of course, all the houses are stucco. And so rather than, you know, bother to tear down the stucco, they just plopped the garage right on top of the stucco. So there was actually a layer of drywall, then there was stucco, then there was drywall, and then there was the garage. And the stucco goes actually down to the ground level, so this slab also wasn’t original. So when they poured this slab, they poured it right up against the house, and so they poured it right up against the stucco. So when I took the stucco out, there was a huge gap over here between the slab and the house foundation, and so it was probably right about like maybe like right here all the way in.

And so what I had to do was take all the stucco out from down there and fill that in. And so what I did, sorry for that, was up against the house, I put neoprene. So this is just neoprene back here. It’s a sheet of neoprene. It’s like, oh, was it 3/16 maybe, up against the foundation of the house to give me like a little expansion joint between this concrete and the house foundation. And then I just got the regular stuff, the Quikrete stuff from Lowe’s, mixed it up, and then poured it in all the way up and down here, all the way along, just poured that in, and then I tried to grind it as flush as I could. I’m not that great at it because I’m not really a contractor or a concrete guy, so I also used some leveling concrete to try to get things smoothed out over here, and then, of course, that didn’t work super great, so I ended up using PC Concrete in a few places to try to get that nice and flush and level.

And then I got to the point where I was like, it’ll be all right, and that’s where I am now because there are a few places still in here that aren’t perfect, but I think by the time I get a thick layer of epoxy down and then get my flakes thrown up in the air and raining down on it, I don’t think you’ll be able to tell.

And I should say that when I did all this, none of these walls were here, so none of the new walls were up. And when the new walls went up, of course, you’re working with drywall, you make a lot of dust, and so all that dust settled onto my nice clean floor, and drywall dust gets into everything, and you can’t really get it out. So what I ended up having to do was rent my grinding or my floor buffer again, and this time I got some 60 grit sanding discs, and I wet sanded the entire floor. You know, I had mopped it three or four times, and I just kept coming up with more gunk, so rather than, you know, keep trying to do that and sailing, I figured I’d want to sand it, and sanding should get pretty much everything, and it actually worked pretty good.

So I, yeah, 60 grit wet sanded the whole thing. I had a helper. My dad was here, and he would, you know, slop a bunch of water on the floor, and then I’d come back with the buffer, and then he’d come after me with the shop vac, which soaked up most of the gunk that the slurry that the sander left behind. And then, after that, I mopped it about two more times, and now I think I could probably eat off of it, so it’s about as clean as it’s gonna get. But tomorrow, the day that I’m going to prime, I’m still going to vacuum the entire thing one more time and probably hit it with a Swiffer just to kind of get whatever last vestiges of whatever else that there is, and anything that Swiffer doesn’t get is going to be in the primer, and that’s just the way it’s gonna be.

So, all right, we’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck.

All right guys, here we are. The first coat’s done. It’s the primer. You can see it’s on behind me. It’s probably about 30 minutes old or so. Went on pretty good, actually. As you can see, it’s a little bit wet. Went on a whole lot faster, a little bit easier than I thought it would, so that’s good. I’m pretty impressed with how the whole thing worked out. But I will tell you, no question that this stuff is no joke. After working on it for about an hour, so I was feeling pretty fine because, as you can see, I got, well, let’s see it there, I got that door all closed up there, and then that door all closed up there, and the door that I’m standing in right now was open, but it was closed to the rest of the house because I have a wife and two new babies in there, and I didn’t want them getting all kinds of fumigated in there. So I ended up fumigating myself. I had all my doors closed because I didn’t want anything to blow in from the outside, but a few specks of dust is a small consequence compared to laying on the floor puddle of your own vomit. So word otherwise, working with this stuff, make sure to always properly ventilate.

So right now I’ve got this door, now turn around, you see this door behind me into my office back there is open with a fan blowing out to the outside world, so now we’re pretty good, but I had learned that lesson the hard way.

Okay guys, so here it is dry. Basically, this is about four hours later. As you can see, I am clearly not a painter because, yeah, there’s roller marks and all kinds of stuff in here. Although the documentation for this stuff did clearly say not to worry about marks and splotchiness because the actual epoxy will cover it up, so we shall see just how well it does. Ultimately, this is just a garage floor, so I’m just gonna have to be okay with a little bit of imperfection, which is hard for me, I will admit, but such is life.

Um, so, so, so, so, all right guys, well here we are. Day two, got the color down and the flakes in, and you can kind of take a look behind me and see what you think. It was easier and harder than I expected. I had my father-in-law over here helping me today, so that helped out quite a bit. He did the mixing and laying the epoxy down on the floor and then using the squeegee, and I rolled back, rolled, and used my little spiky shoes to get on there and throw the flakes. The spiky shoes are a pain in the ass. My foot kept slipping out, and so if you’re gonna do this, make sure to tighten them down really well. Test them before you go out and do the epoxy. I didn’t do that, and so I was stuck while the epoxy was kind of trying to dry, trying to get the shoes on my feet and get them all tightened down so they wouldn’t slip off. That was a real pain in the butt. I kept twisting my ankle to the side, which caused my foot to like slip and slide into the epoxy, which I then had to re-roll.

So there’s a few little things, but for the most part, it ended up looking really good. Like, I’m super happy with the color. I’m super happy with how it looks. It’s been about six hours. It’s still a little bit tacky. I’m hoping that it dries enough that I can walk on it and put my clear coat on tomorrow. I have heard that sometimes you get some problems if you don’t mix it well enough that it will never stop being tacky. I’m hoping I don’t have that issue. My father-in-law was the one that did the mixing. He’s usually a pretty thorough guy, so I’m not too worried about it, but I mean, I spent a lot of money, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this garage, so I’m a little bit worried about it. Hopefully, I can sleep tonight, but we’ll come back tomorrow and take a look.

All right guys, here it is finally done. The floor is dry, and I can walk on it. Obviously, I’ve got some other stuff going on here. I’m getting ready to put my baseboards down, and I’ve got a mat for the vehicle so that it leaks a little bit of oil, so I don’t want to get that over my nice new floor when that happens. So I got the mat for that, and still just kind of putting some stuff together, cleaning some things up, but for the most part, I’m pretty happy. Yeah, I think it looks nice. I’m not a great flake thrower, obviously, so take that into account. There’s some splotchiness and weirdness overall with that, but not too bad. Overall, I love the color. I’m real happy with the shine and how it all kind of turned out and how hard the floor is. I’ve got no doubt that it will protect the floor.

There’s a couple of things, so the top coat was really hard to put on because it’s clear, and you can’t see where you’ve been, and you don’t know exactly where it’s gone down, so that was really tough. I was really thorough, tried to make sure that I rolled over every spot at least twice, and I got some weirdness with the top coat. This will be hard to see, I think, on camera. The worst spot is over here. Let me see if I can… You can see it in the reflection of the lights here, so I gotta get down here so you can see. Okay, so if you look here, you can kind of see, let’s see, that how it looks like it’s kind of beaded up right there, and it didn’t actually lay down, especially like right in there. Yeah, I’m not sure what happened there. It’s solid. I mean, you know, there’s no, uh, that’s, it’s not wet or anything. It looks wet, but it’s not.

So, um, no, I don’t know. I’m not a pro at this, so, you know, I’m sure a professional could tell me exactly what I did wrong, but overall, I’m mostly happy. As I’ve said before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, I’m kind of a perfectionist, so it’s hard for me to live with those little kind of imperfections. But as time goes on, I’ll be okay with it.

So, um, anyway, I’ll come back in a little bit once I’ve got all my, uh, the rest of my garage stuff done, once I’ve got the base down and I’ve got my furniture in here and everything, and we’ll talk about the entire Armor Epoxy experience and what I think, what I would have done differently, and overall impressions. Fascinating. Thank you, past Ed.

Okay, so here we are at the end. The floor is down. It’s been a few weeks. I’ve had a chance to walk around on it, drive on it, live with the little bit of strangeness that I got from the top coat. So what do I think? Would I do it again? Yes. It looks phenomenal. Unless you actually get right down there on your hands and knees and look at that top coat, you can’t even tell. Even the flakes that I did a terrible job of throwing down look really good. I mean, in pictures, they look amazing. I’ve gotten a ton of compliments from friends and family that have seen it on pictures, thinking that, you know, it’s done professionally when it was just done by me, who is not a professional. So it can be done by somebody who’s not a pro.

So the breakdown, the good: it is extremely durable. I’ve dropped stuff on it already, not even a mark. It’s easy to clean. I’ve actually got some overspray from doing a spray painting project in here, wiped right up. It’s beautiful. I love the way that it looks. It’s super hard. You can knock on it. You don’t have to, I don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s going to come up. It was very easy to work with the primer and the actual epoxy itself, especially I was worried about whether or not the epoxy was going to set up too quickly, but I left my AC unit on overnight a little bit lower than normal to get the garage floor nice and cool. I had plenty of time to work with both the primer and the actual epoxy itself.

The top coat is part of the bad, but we’ll get into that in a second. What other good is there? I really do feel like it’s going to last a good long time. I feel like I got a good value for my money. It was nice to have the kit and never have everything come with a kit. Another good was the Armor Epoxy customer service, but that came out of a bad. So one of the bads was when I got all the stuff, it didn’t come in the packaging that the website for Armor Epoxy said that it was going to come in. They told me that it was going to come in a couple of buckets that I could use to mix the product, and all it came in was some cardboard boxes. The cans that the product came in were incredibly beat up, and one of them was actually cracked open on the bottom, and it leaked a little bit into the container or the cardboard box that it was in. It wasn’t enough for me to send it back, but it was disappointing.

So I contacted Armor Epoxy and said, hey, you know, guys, for the amount of money that I’m spending on this, eight hundred dollars, I shouldn’t have to worry about this stuff being broken open in shipping, and why did I not get the containers you said I was going to get? And I got to go out and do Lowe’s and buy my own buckets. And so they gave me a little bit of a break, not a lot, but they did make me happy in that regard for customer service, so that’s a good.

Now the bad, again, the way it was shipped and the lack of the buckets. I mean, their website clearly said you’re going to get these buckets and didn’t. Now COVID is going on, so there’s some weird stuff there too, so I can kind of give them a pass on that, but I still put that in the bad column because, I mean, you don’t advertise you’re going to get something and then not send it out, especially for that kind of money.

The other bad is that the top coat is really hard to work with. Now that’s not Armor Epoxy’s fault; it’s just the nature of clear top coats. It was just really hard to figure out where I had been and get it on appropriately to make sure I didn’t miss any spots, and my guess is that that may have contributed to the ugly part of this review, which is how the actual top coat laid down. Now you saw the video earlier, some of the bubbling that I had. It wasn’t really bubbling; it’s like, um, beading maybe. Now, as I’m looking right now, I’m looking right here at this floor, there is none of that beading right here. It’s a nice smooth piece of top coat, but there are places where that happened. Now, I don’t know what I did wrong. It may very well be something that I did. I followed the directions, which were very good. They had really good directions that came with the kit, but whatever I did, I did something wrong.

So takeaways: if you’re gonna do this yourself, prepare, prepare, prepare. I felt like I prepared way more than I needed to, and it wasn’t enough. The floor was ready to go, nice and clean, pristine, perfect, but I hadn’t prepared myself. I didn’t prepare my spike shoes. I didn’t really prepare my, um, the stuff that I had to, you know, be in there to mix with. I didn’t really prepare my father-in-law. I just kind of threw him in there and said, oh, here’s the instructions, have fun, mix it up. You know, you did a great job, but hindsight being what it is, I probably would have given him a little bit more preparation guidance. You know, make sure you mix it this way and pour it this way or whatever. It all turned out fine, but that’s what I would have changed.

And again, especially with the spike shoes, oh man, those things are a pain in the… If you don’t get them on tight, make sure they’re on tight and make sure you tighten them and get them tested before you’re walking out here on the epoxy. I can’t tell you the number of times that my foot slipped, and then my shoe went right into the epoxy, and I got all over my shoes, and then I had to go re-roll that part of the floor. And there’s a big patch of floor over here that has flakes like embedded all the way down because I had to re-roll it after I’d already flaked it because my foot slipped and went in there. Now you can’t tell that it’s like that because the epoxy covers all that up.

This other thing that I was worried about in the beginning was whether or not the epoxy was going to cover a lot of the flaws that were in the floor, little cracks, little divots, that kind of stuff. And with the flakes, it’s marvelous. I couldn’t even point to where the cracks used to be. I couldn’t point to anywhere along this wall here and tell you where the old concrete pour I had to do to replace the stucco gap where that was. I was worried about that genuinely, and that’s not even an issue.

Is it worth the money? Probably. It really kind of depends on your situation and what you want to accomplish with your garage. There are some competitors out there to Armor Epoxy. I looked them up and did my research, but in the end, I chose Armor Epoxy because it is 100% solids. I didn’t have to worry about the product that I was getting. It came in a kit, had told you all the instructions on how to do it, it came with a primer, it came with a top coat. They were responsive to my messages, and I had a bunch of questions for them. So in the end, that’s what I went with. Would I go with them again? Yes, with some caveats, and that’s the things that I’ve already said: prepare, prepare, prepare. And I would have to go back and ask them what I did wrong to this top coat, why it’s doing what it’s doing, but it doesn’t bother me enough to worry about it. I suppose if I had to, I could put another top coat on, and that would probably take care of it if I did it right because it’ll cover up all that just like a layer of clear coat, but I’m not worried about it.

So there you go, the Bullnose Garage review of Armor Epoxy. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks for watching, guys. We’ll see you next time.