Garage Flooring

Four completely different answers

Garage flooring is not one decision. There are four distinct products here, they solve different problems, and the right one is determined mostly by the state of your slab and how long your car can live on the driveway.

People default to epoxy because it is what the aisle sells. If your slab is cracked, or your car cannot be displaced for three days, or your real problem is salt in February, epoxy is the wrong answer and no amount of surface preparation will change that.

The cure schedule is the real cost

The price on the box is not what a coating costs you. What it costs is the days your garage is unusable, and that is published — which makes this the rare category you can decide with arithmetic.

That last row is the argument for tiles that nobody makes loudly enough: you lay them in an afternoon and park on them that evening. For a single-car household with nowhere else to put the car, that can be the whole decision.

Prep is why coatings fail

Not product choice. Not application technique. Prep. A coating bonds to clean, etched, dry concrete and peels off anything else, and the peeling happens months later when you have forgotten the shortcut you took.

There are two steps and both are necessary. Degrease first: oil and grease in the pores of the slab are invisible and fatal. Then etch, which opens the surface so the coating has something to key into. Rust-Oleum's Quick Prep does all three steps in one pass at 250 sq ft per gallon, which is the version of prep people actually finish. For heavy oil staining, degrease separately first with something stronger — Oil Eater, Krud Kutter or Zep — then etch.

One useful signal when choosing a kit: whether etch is in the box. EpoxyShield, RockSolid and ArmorPoxy's 17-piece kit all include it. A material-only purchase does not, and the cost of the prep product is not optional.

Coverage: do the arithmetic before you order

Coverage figures in this category are published and they vary enormously, because they depend on how porous your slab is and how thick you want the film.

• Gorilla 12-piece — up to 550 sq ft from two gallons. Covers a real 2.5-car bay.
• Gorilla 7-piece — up to 275 sq ft from one gallon. One bay.
• ArmorPoxy 3-gallon — 250 to 600 sq ft, 'depending on floor porosity'. That is a 2.4x spread, and it is the honest way to state coverage.
• Simiron 1100SL 3-gallon — 200 to 350 sq ft, because it is designed as a high-build basecoat.
• KILZ 1-part paint — 300 to 400 sq ft per gallon on smooth surfaces.

A standard 2-car garage is roughly 400-480 sq ft. Measure yours, pick the coverage figure at the pessimistic end of the published range, and buy accordingly — running out two-thirds of the way across a floor mid-cure is unrecoverable.

What it all costs, worked out per square foot and DIY against professional, is on epoxy garage floor cost.

What about 1-part floor paint?

It has a real place, and KILZ is refreshingly honest about what that is. A 1-part epoxy-acrylic paint is paint: no mixing, no pot life, 300-400 sq ft per gallon, and it is explicitly not for forklift traffic or hydrostatic pressure. It will look far better than bare concrete and it will not survive what a 2-part system survives.

Buy it for a garage you are selling, a floor you want tidy rather than armored, or a first attempt before you commit to the three-day version. See the best garage floor paint.

Where to start

Check your slab first. Cracks, spalling, flaking from a previous coating, or a surface that darkens when you pour water on it (which means it is sealed) all point away from coating and toward tiles or a mat.

If the slab is sound, the ranked coatings with live prices are on the best garage floor coatings, and the epoxy kits specifically on the best garage floor epoxy kits. Floor and heat are the pair that make a garage usable in winter, so it is worth reading garage heaters at the same time — and coating is the biggest single line item in garage setup under $2,500.