DIY Garage Floor Painting Adventures

We're still working to reassemble our garage after the great makeover of 2016, but I thought I'd show you the kit we used to paint the floor, in case any of you have been dying to paint your garage floor!

You'll see a bit more of this after you see the whole garage makeover process, but basically, our goal with it was to make it into a space that we could use for additional entertaining if we needed to, but we still want it to function as a garage for the majority of the time.

So...in addition to the other improvements we made, we decided to paint the floor with the Rust-Oleum Garage Floor Coating Kit. We got ours at Lowe's, and we found out you can have the paint tinted to any one of nine colors. We chose a tan, because we thought it would coordinate well with our grayish greenish walls.

Here is what came in the kit for a 2.5 car garage {not pictured: one bag of white powder that was a cleaner. Ryan used it before I took the picture!}

 

When you actually get ready to paint {we'll come back to the cleaning in a minute}, you combine the contents of the small paint cans {Part A} into the big paint cans {Part B} and stir for three minutes. {The big paint cans are only filled partway, so there's room for the contents of the small cans. Even comes with a stir stick!} The two remaining bags in the picture are the chips that look much like confetti. Those get sprinkled into the paint after it's applied to the floor, but before it dries.

So. Let's talk about the cleaning.

Ryan had read in reviews that the worst part of this whole process was cleaning the floor to prep it. And he affirmed wholeheartedly that it is TRUE. He spent about a WEEK working on these floors in the evenings after work.

He started by {obviously} clearing everything out of the garage. He purchased a cleaner and degreaser all in one and used a deck brush to scrub the entire floor. Then he hosed it down really well to get all the cleaner off. Then he repeated that process a second time. After that, he used the powder that came with the kit {concrete etch}, mixed it with water, and used that on the entire surface of the floor to clean it again. Three more hose rinsing rounds came after that, because Ryan likes to be thorough!

With the floor completely clean, it was time for drying. We put four fans in the garage and let them run for about four days to make sure the floor was absolutely dry. How long this part takes depends on how quickly your floor dries and the level of humidity at the time. It did not work in our favor that particular week.

Obviously during this time, we could not park in the garage or even walk out there in our shoes. We didn't want to track in ANY MORE DIRT.

When it came time to apply the actual paint, the temperature had to be just right, so we waited until the humidity lowered a bit and it wasn't so hot out before we applied the paint. Ryan ran some painter's tape along the edge of the garage, where the door comes down, so we would know where to stop painting, and then it was time to get started!  

Ryan combined one big and one small can and waited to see if we would need the other before mixing them. {We did not.} He took over rolling the paint onto the floor with a roller on a handle. The paint was incredibly thin and dried really quickly. We learned we had to do pretty small sections in order for it to stay wet enough for me to throw on the chips.

I went along behind and threw in the little confetti chips.

 I divided the two bags into four bowls and tried to scatter them evenly over four quadrants of the garage.

Yeah. That was a fail. I almost ran out!! We only used half the cleaner and half the paint but I could have used twice as many chips!!

I did find out later that you can purchase additional bags separately. So if you're confetti happy like I am, you might look into it!

The actual painting process took us two hours, working together. Definitely much easier than the previous week of cleaning!

We were supposed to stay off the floor entirely for 24 hours and leave cars and other heavy things off of it for a week. But the end result was stunning.

Here was the garage before we painted:

And after:

We think it looks so much brighter!

Here's a close-up:

Would we do it again? Well, please don't make us, but yes! It really was a cost-effective improvement to the space, and the actual painting process was quick and painless. Ryan may not be QUITE ready for that much prep cleaning again yet. But we are so happy with the result! Another great DIY project find!