CASE STUDIES
Improperly Installed Epoxy Floors
A homeowner in Kansas City had hired a painter to pressure wash and install Rustoleum from Home Depot on her garage floor, because she was planning to put her house on the market. She noticed problems right away. The painter had not taken the time to address an unsightly crack and there were variances in the grey color of the epoxy. Just days after the botched installation, she asked us to come in, remove the epoxy, and do the job right.
Why DIY Epoxy Floor Applications Fail
One of the most common reasons for epoxy failure is improper prep. Concrete should be ground prior to installation, not just pressure washed, and if there are cracks in the concrete, they must be repaired prior to the epoxy application. Properly mixed epoxy will have a nice, uniform appearance. Because we always do the necessary repairs, grind floors, and properly mix epoxy, we have not had a single failure on any of the hundreds of floors we have done.
Our Epoxy Installation Process
Our competent, knowledgable installers take pride in their professional epoxy garage floor installation work. It truly is a craft and should not be performed as a DIY project. Here’s the basic process.
We easily ground all of the painter’s epoxy off and repaired the crack using a process called chasing. It involved widening the crack just enough to allow a filler to properly adhere. Once the filler dried, we did the final grind to level it out so that it would not show through the epoxy application. We applied the epoxy and a full flake broadcast, and then finished with a polyaspartic topcoat.
The homeowner was very pleased with the even color and topcoat gloss, and how much better our full flake broadcast looked compared to what the painter had attempted. The floor will stay in great shape for decades—a great selling point for potential buyers when the homeowner puts the house on the market. We completed the job in a single day, and our fair and competitive prices were not really that much more than what the painter had charged.