So while it may appear that my weekend was all exciting swimming holes, lollipops, and sunshine, it was actually anything but. The hiking was neatly fit into the picture between hmmm, oh crap and this sucks all weekend long.
I am going to give you a freebie piece of advice today (I am very nice you see). Listen carefully. NEVER. EVER. DECIDE. TO. EPOXY. YOUR. GARAGE. FLOOR.
Did you catch that? If not, start over at the previous paragraph and repeat it until you do.
Am I being dramatic? No, I am understating my stance. Dramatic would have been a picture of me holding a gun saying I will shoot anyone who mentions epoxying a garage floor in my presence.
On with the story. We started this home garage makeover edition a couple of weeks ago. Last weekend was a hard but extremely rewarding couple of days of cleaning and painting the garage and getting a new awesome door installed. Our agenda this weekend was the floor. We had already bought an epoxy kit and figured we could knock it out in a day. Hence I planned a hiking trip on Sunday as a reward.
So Saturday we get up bright and early, take every last item out of the garage (most of it is still sitting in our kitchen), and start the process of cleaning the floor. I figured this would be the hard part, hahahahahahahaha wrong. So we sit down to watch the dvd that came with the kit. There is your first clue that this might not be something you want to attempt. IKEA sends a picture to assemble an entire office, but these people need a dvd? Hmmm.
So it mentions that if you have any previous paint on your floor (we do) that you need to make sure to remove it before starting the prepping layer. We thought we would just ignore that direction, but unfortunately realized that just by spraying water on the garage floor, paint was starting to peal up. Honestly, who paints a garage with normal paint? Dumb. So we realize that we need to remove the paint. I got to Lowes (trip #1) to purchase a large paint scratcher and a wire brush and we still naively think we can do this.
Very quickly we realize that while some paint comes up easily, the bottom layer and other spots do not. So Tom takes Lowes#2 trip to the store for advice and they send him home with a chemical paint remover. Sweet, just pore it on and watch it go to town, right? Not quite. First, the stuff is acid and burns the skin. Secondly, it smells terrible, is very slippery which makes work with a new ACL very dangerous. And third, IT DOESN'T WORK! The worse part is that it ruins the entire finish of the floor and leave the paint bubbled and sticky. Now it all MUST be removed.
So back to the store for trip #3 and this time to rent a power sander. We get the biggest one they have with a 14 inch diameter. Tom plugs it in and tentatively pulls the trigger. I must admit I still laugh when I picture Tom's entire body getting thrown around in a circle in as that sander spun. Needless to say that after ruining 8 pieces of sandpaper which kept ripping off and throwing my poor man around, we went back to the store for a fourth trip with power sander permanently removed from the Christmas list.
Trip #4 yields the rental of a pressure washer. This was our last resort before selling the house for peanuts and moving just to avoid the garage forever. Luckily this worked, but only if you held the nozzle 1 inch from the floor and slowly swept it along the paint. Only problem was that it was kind of like coloring a garage floor with a marker: very freaking slow. So that took most of day in itself. The big problem was that the paint would fly up everything: on you, on the freshly painted walls, on the brand new door. It made a huge mess and in spraying down the walls later to clean, we effective water logged the paint and will pretty much have to redo it.
The final fun portion of Sunday evening was clean up. The entire driveway as well as the street in front of our house was filled with a gray goo also known as paint flecks mixed with water...very appetizing. Cleaning that up was a saga in itself. So basically after 48 hours of manual work and countless wasted moolah, we now have a floor with spotty paint and soggy walls and a musty smell in our garage. The saga continues as we still haven't actually epoxyed anything.
So please, next time your significant other decided that redoing the garage floor sounds like a good idea, smile at them, sneak up behind them and clobber them over the head with a blunt object. Hope that they wake up with nothing more than a headache and no memory of anything remotely like the words epoxy nor garage.
Postscript: We plan to hold a gourmet meal on our floor when we are done because it better be that damn awesome.
I am going to give you a freebie piece of advice today (I am very nice you see). Listen carefully. NEVER. EVER. DECIDE. TO. EPOXY. YOUR. GARAGE. FLOOR.
Did you catch that? If not, start over at the previous paragraph and repeat it until you do.
Am I being dramatic? No, I am understating my stance. Dramatic would have been a picture of me holding a gun saying I will shoot anyone who mentions epoxying a garage floor in my presence.
On with the story. We started this home garage makeover edition a couple of weeks ago. Last weekend was a hard but extremely rewarding couple of days of cleaning and painting the garage and getting a new awesome door installed. Our agenda this weekend was the floor. We had already bought an epoxy kit and figured we could knock it out in a day. Hence I planned a hiking trip on Sunday as a reward.
So Saturday we get up bright and early, take every last item out of the garage (most of it is still sitting in our kitchen), and start the process of cleaning the floor. I figured this would be the hard part, hahahahahahahaha wrong. So we sit down to watch the dvd that came with the kit. There is your first clue that this might not be something you want to attempt. IKEA sends a picture to assemble an entire office, but these people need a dvd? Hmmm.
So it mentions that if you have any previous paint on your floor (we do) that you need to make sure to remove it before starting the prepping layer. We thought we would just ignore that direction, but unfortunately realized that just by spraying water on the garage floor, paint was starting to peal up. Honestly, who paints a garage with normal paint? Dumb. So we realize that we need to remove the paint. I got to Lowes (trip #1) to purchase a large paint scratcher and a wire brush and we still naively think we can do this.
Very quickly we realize that while some paint comes up easily, the bottom layer and other spots do not. So Tom takes Lowes#2 trip to the store for advice and they send him home with a chemical paint remover. Sweet, just pore it on and watch it go to town, right? Not quite. First, the stuff is acid and burns the skin. Secondly, it smells terrible, is very slippery which makes work with a new ACL very dangerous. And third, IT DOESN'T WORK! The worse part is that it ruins the entire finish of the floor and leave the paint bubbled and sticky. Now it all MUST be removed.
So back to the store for trip #3 and this time to rent a power sander. We get the biggest one they have with a 14 inch diameter. Tom plugs it in and tentatively pulls the trigger. I must admit I still laugh when I picture Tom's entire body getting thrown around in a circle in as that sander spun. Needless to say that after ruining 8 pieces of sandpaper which kept ripping off and throwing my poor man around, we went back to the store for a fourth trip with power sander permanently removed from the Christmas list.
Trip #4 yields the rental of a pressure washer. This was our last resort before selling the house for peanuts and moving just to avoid the garage forever. Luckily this worked, but only if you held the nozzle 1 inch from the floor and slowly swept it along the paint. Only problem was that it was kind of like coloring a garage floor with a marker: very freaking slow. So that took most of day in itself. The big problem was that the paint would fly up everything: on you, on the freshly painted walls, on the brand new door. It made a huge mess and in spraying down the walls later to clean, we effective water logged the paint and will pretty much have to redo it.
The final fun portion of Sunday evening was clean up. The entire driveway as well as the street in front of our house was filled with a gray goo also known as paint flecks mixed with water...very appetizing. Cleaning that up was a saga in itself. So basically after 48 hours of manual work and countless wasted moolah, we now have a floor with spotty paint and soggy walls and a musty smell in our garage. The saga continues as we still haven't actually epoxyed anything.
So please, next time your significant other decided that redoing the garage floor sounds like a good idea, smile at them, sneak up behind them and clobber them over the head with a blunt object. Hope that they wake up with nothing more than a headache and no memory of anything remotely like the words epoxy nor garage.
Postscript: We plan to hold a gourmet meal on our floor when we are done because it better be that damn awesome.
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3 comments:
Take back the epoxy you bought. It should come with a Barbie dream house cause it's for little kids. Get online and go to www.sika.com Find a local supplier who has sikaguard 62 high build epoxy. It's what we waterproofers use. It's gonna be about 4 times as expensive, but one batch will do the whole floor, and it will actually stay there...forever. The Lowes stuff peels up as soon as you drive on it once or twice. Plus it will get you very high, followed shortly by bloody stools. It also comes in OSU gray.
Oh yeah, you can put it on on top of other paint. it has the highest possible Cohesion to Adhesion ratio this side of cherynobl.
unfort Chris we already put the crappy epoxy down. but it should last long enough for us to sell the place right in three years right? next time, u'r coming out to show us your expertise in this.
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