Alex Gaudino

Garage Flooring Options | Clutter Video Tip

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• published: 16 May 2012
• views: 15829

http://www.ClutterDiet.com Get organized with home organizing tips from professional organizers at The Clutter Diet. Do you want to get in on the ground floor? What if that ground floor is your garage floor? Garage flooring can be greasy, dirty and gross- but it doesn't always have to be. There are several options for cool garage floors- epoxy garage flooring, concrete floor coating, etc. In today's video Lorie Marrero is taking the floor to show you her garage floor and the steps and pitfalls involved in her process. You don't always have to have a professional flooring company install to insure you have good, quality floors. You just may be floored by the results. Following this advice just might inspire you to mop up the floor with those oil and grease stains! These Clutter Video Tips are posted frequently here on our clutterdiet organizing channel. You can search Twitter for #ClutterVideoTip also to find comments on our organizing tips. Lorie Marrero is the creator of ClutterDiet.com and the author of The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life. Lorie also serves as the national spokesperson for Goodwill Industries International and ambassador of the Donate Movement. Related Links: http://www.clutterdiet.com http://donate.goodwill.org http://www.clutterdiet.com/learnmore http://www.facebook.com/clutterdiet Related Videos: Clutter Video Tip: Options for Garage Storage Cabinets- http://bit.ly/TCDGarage Hi. I'm Lorie Marrero, & today's Clutter Video Tip is about garage floor options. What we have done in this garage is used an epoxy kit that we bought at our local home improvement center. This took about $300 for a three-car garage. & it was about a 3-5 day process. I want to explain how we did this & then you can decide what options make sense for you. We had a garage floor that had 6 plus years of accumulated oil stains & other car fluids that are unknown & we also had spilled paint on the floor. It was dark green, it was horrible. I got sick of looking at that all the time & when you have your normal car fluids that get on the floor, they really do absorb into the concrete, so it's a good idea to do some kind of servicing just to make it easier to clean. We did this epoxy kit. The first day you clean it. & there's a product called Jasco that I highly recommend that helped us remove a lot of the paint that was on the floor. & then the kit comes with a detergent that you use to prepare the floor for the epoxy. You have to let that dry for 24 hours. Then you come back & put the epoxy on in sections. You do one section & then you put the optional plastic flakes on it. This comes in a can, it looks like a can of grated Parmesan cheese. It has these little flakes in it with these holes & then you just shake them out. You do each section, shake on the little particles, & it gives a kind of a granite stone look to the finished product. Then you let that dry for 24 hours. There's an optional clear coat that we did & I think I would recommend doing that too. That third day, you do the clear coat. & then you have to wait, one or two days, before you can actually park a car on the surface. It takes a while, you've got to have your garage completely clear for that amount of time, so you want to think about that & plan for that. & then at the end you have a really good-looking garage floor. We have had some issues, as was predicted by some people, that they say this home improvement center do-it-yourself style of epoxy is going to have problems with what they call "hot tire lift-off." Yes, where we park the cars, the tires have lifted off pieces of the epoxy over 4 years. For me that's okay, the cars are usually parked there anyway, so you don't really see it, & it's still really easy to clean. All we have to do is hose it out, sweep it out, & the oil stains don't collect like they used to. It looks really good with minimal tire lifting. There are professional companies that come in & do a more professional grade epoxy & they charge a lot more money. Like I said, this was about $300. My thought at the time when we did this project, I believe it was going to be $900 & upwards to do this three-car garage. That's why we elected to do it ourselves. There are other options. You can do tiling, & also large mats that are created for a similar purpose. But you can make a choice based on the price & what works for you. We just found that for us this do-it-yourself option was a good one. I hope that your garage will be looking good very soon. It's that time of year. If you want some help with your garage project, we can do that in our Member Message Board area. For the price of a pizza you have unlimited access to our team of organizing experts. You can find out more at clutterdiet.com/learnmore. See you next time, & may you always be happy & grateful for having more than enough.