Garage Floor - Resin/PVC tiles/Paint - what's best?

[Leftfootwonder]

Hi all,

Looking for honest thoughts/experience on each please as wanting to cover my concrete garage floor. Will be tooling in there so want to be able to clean up oil spills and the like easily but also want it to be durable and low maintenance as i will park my car on it. I am leaning toward resin for the finish but read this only lasts 5 years or so?

Thoughts and advice greatly appreciated.

Cheers

[GreenV8S]

I carefully and meticulously applied some fairly expensive garage floor paint, only for it to start lifting eighteen months later. Five years life for an epoxy coating seems like a huge success to me.

[paintman]

Local force went to considerable expense to have the garage floor of the motorway unit prepped & painted.
Left to cure for the required time plus a bit extra.
You could tell exactly where the first patrol car had been driven into the garage as the paint came off onto its tyres.....

[PhilboSE]

There’s resin floors and resin paint.

Resin paint is just a more durable form of paint but it doesn’t last.

Resin floors are different and will be 100% solid and durable BUT the concrete floor needs to be very flat for it to work. Really it needs to be power floated and if it’s already down then that isn’t an option (actually power floating a garage area is usually too small anyway). So lots of work and mess to grind and fill the typical concrete slab.

You can get solid rubber tiles but be careful there are various grades and the good ones get quite pricey.

Finally there’s ceramic tiles, as used in most posh showrooms/workshops. Suitable tiles can be pretty cheap so it comes down to the cost / effort of getting them laid. They can be quite forgiving of existing concrete floors because you have the thickness of the adhesive layer to take up any ripples in the concrete slab.

Anything else like carpet / carpet tiles has to treated as sacrificial and replaced frequently.

I just had a garage built and had free choice. Initially I thought I was going to go solid resin but it was just too much hassle and got pricey. In the end I went with ceramic tiles and am very pleased with them. I used the 30x30cm Dottis as used by many PHers; they cost about £700 for a 50m2 triple garage (not inc. laying).

[Leftfootwonder]

Thanks all for your replies. Really appreciated and interesting.

I was steering away from ceramics as my fists of ham have been known to drop things now and then and I I worry about cracking the tiles but might be worth investigating further from what you say.

[jke11y]

I've got the PH-favourite Vitra tiles in my garage - you'd be going some to crack one, I find them really hard wearing.

Ive sprayed brake cleaner, got brake fluid on them, oils, and all other usual garage mess - and they mop up like new. Cheap too (I have a trade account with CTD and they are about £12/m, although they are a similar price online).

[T1547]

Leftfootwonder said:

Hi all,

Looking for honest thoughts/experience on each please as wanting to cover my concrete garage floor. Will be tooling in there so want to be able to clean up oil spills and the like easily but also want it to be durable and low maintenance as i will park my car on it. I am leaning toward resin for the finish but read this only lasts 5 years or so?

Thoughts and advice greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Resin flooring can absolutely last longer than 5 years; like everything it depends how much you want to spend and in the case of resin flooring - the type and thickness.

For a domestic garage a good quality epoxy resin coating (sika, Mapei etc) up to 1mm thickness should last you 10 years.

Things you may wish to consider are, as above - how flat your concrete floor is, will it need levelling first? On a new concrete floor power-floated finish may be good to assist getting a flat finish but it will need abrasive treatment before applying a resin coating to open up the surface pores.
Does your garage have a dpc under the slab? If the slab is damp then there is a chance the resin coating (impermeable) will lift. In which case you may need to apply a suitable liquid applied dpm first.
Just a few extra thoughts for you..

Edited by T1547 on Friday 28th February 13:54