Part 2 of the Austinshop never-ending saga. Previous part here.

With money down on the machines, I had to find somewhere to put them. Luckily, I just moved into a place with a garage! But, the garage was kind of a disaster. The previous tenant had left a bunch of stuff in the garage, and additionally pretty heavily damaged the garage door on his side. Luckily, cleaning up his stuff wasn’t too bad, and his security deposit went towards buying a new door.

The garage, trash removal in progress.

Its also worth putting in a picture of the place I moved into, which…. needs some love. Highlights: the random washer/dryer hookup in the kitchen, the missing cupboard doors, the general 60s/70s aesthetic.. will be upgraded in the coming years. But, garage first- gotta pick your battles wisely.

The garage after a bit of cleaning. I have the left half, the tenants upstairs have the right half. So, I have about 160 sq ft to make myself a small shop!

The first step in the ~epic garage transformation~ was epoxying the floor. Epoxying a garage floor makes the place easier to clean, but more importantly it just brightens up the place significantly. Aaron and Al highly recommended the products from Epoxy.com, so I went with Epoxy.com product #2 Chemical Resistant Epoxy in slate blue. If you don’t read to the end of this post, the TLDR is: it was worth the 550 smackers and the 2 weeks of effort. Not cheap, and time consuming to use, but it’s good stuff, and the end result was fantastic. This stuff consists of one layer of primer which really sticks to the concrete and then two coats of colored epoxy to get the final beauty.

The first step in installation was washing the concrete with Purple Power. In hindsight, this step wasn’t 100% necessary, as I was about to sand off the top layer of concrete anyways.

Next, I rented a diamond sander from home depot.

This thing RIPPED. I did wet sanding to keep the dust down, but even with thorough flooding, this thing was DEAFENING to use. I guess that’s how you know it’s workin good. Wherever the sander didn’t reach, I used some diamond paper.

Floor sanded, now to let it dry. There were a few dark spots that refused to be completely sanded out, but apparently that is fine. I washed out all the grit with a thorough hosing out. Definitely lucky that this place is a garage and not a basement. The hosing paid off, after walking around the place with socks on, the socks remained black.

Finally- the big day! Floor all dry! Letsgooo– oh wait, the garage roof leaks, and it rained. GRRRR.

I stopped by the HD an bought a tarp. Foiled this time….

Finally, a few days later, once the floor was actually dry, it was time to try again. I re shop-vacced the floor to restore it to its pristine condition, and also hung a heater inside to aid in epoxy drying.

I warmed the epoxy a bit by setting it on top of my toaster, because it was a littler colder than the recommended temperature.

I made a mixing thing out of some steel wire. This was because all of the mixers at home depot were either made of or contained plastics, and some plastics do not play well with epoxy. I realized eventually that this mixer was actually scraping the bottom of the PVC bucket and introducing PVC chips into the mixer, so if you do this, make sure to bend the end of the mixer up so it doesn’t rub.

I didn’t take any pictures of the actual epoxying, but the results were quite satisfying:

Only one interesting problem presented itself: somehow the primer developed a TON of bubbles. It is hard to know whether the bubbles formed due to overly aggressive mixing or due to aggressive rolling. I suspect it was due to over-aggressive rolling as the product was beginning to cure, as evidenced by the photo below, where you can faintly see rolling marks which required a lot of sanding. However, there were also a bunch of bubbles in other areas, so it’s hard to know.

Anyhow, sanding isn’t too bad, if you have a power sander. I sanded down all the bubbles, and shop vacced and terry clothed up the dust. I also got a heat gun to potentially heat gun the next layer as it went down to remove the bubbles, although this turned out to be unnecessary as the topcoat was much thinner than the primer.

So, layer 2 is where things went from good to BAD. The first half of the second layer actually went really, really well, with zero bubbles, and it looked beautiful:

About 30 seconds after I took this photo is when things went wrong. I picked up the bucket of mixed epoxy, and it was HOT. Because of the garage’s shape, it had just taken a while to get the back corner where the door is, and this was about 20 minutes in. I should have dumped out all the epoxy onto the floor immediately, instead of leaving it in the mixing bucket.. whoops. So I did the best I could, I dumped out what was left and rolled the half-cured globs out as best I could. Unfortunately, the surface finish turned out BAD:

I guess that’s why there is a second coat. I just covered it extra thick in the problematic areas. For future reference, the maximum amount of product I would mix up if working alone would be 100 square foot worth. I was additionally hindered by the fact that my garage isn’t square, which made things more difficult. Maybe if the garage were square, or I had simply worked more efficiently, I could have done the whole 160 sq ft in one go, but for the second coat I chose to do it in just two parts. The second coat went pretty well, except for a few small areas where it didn’t stick very well to the previous layer. If I had to do this process again, I’d do the second coat only 12 hours after the first, so it is still a little tacky and therefore sticks a little better to the previous coat. But definitely GOOD ENOUGH!

Good enough- and it looks beautiful! Read on for part 3: the excavation.