Garage floor coating that stands up to Michigan winters

What a Michigan winter does to a bare garage floor

Every winter your car carries brine and road salt off the street and parks it on your slab. The snowmelt sits there, soaks in, freezes, and thaws again. Over a few seasons the top of the concrete starts to pit and flake, oil stains set in, and the dust never stops coming up. A coated floor sheds all of that. Salt water wipes off, oil sits on top, and the floor sweeps clean.

Garage paint and store-bought kits peel because they sit on top of unprepared concrete, and hot tires pull them up. Our system is different from the first step: we open up the concrete so the base coat bonds into it, not onto it.

Our five-step garage system

1. Diamond grind. We grind the whole floor to open the surface, then vacuum the dust. You don't need to sweep before we come. We're going to make a mess and clean it up ourselves.
2. Repair. Cracks, pitting and joints get filled with polygrout. Even hairline cracks get cut out with the grinder and stitched so the relief comes out of the crack. Shark fins along the walls get knocked down and the edge gets an even scrape.
3. Polyurea base coat. This is the layer that grabs the concrete. Once it's mixed, the installer has about 15 to 18 minutes to get it down right. It doesn't level itself the way epoxy does, so the person holding the squeegee matters.
4. Full flake broadcast. We cover the wet base wall to wall in polymer flake in the color you picked. Full coverage hides tire marks and dust and gives the floor grip when it's wet.
5. Polyaspartic topcoat. A clear, UV-stable topcoat seals the flake. It won't yellow when the door is open all summer, and it shrugs off oil, salt and most garage chemicals.

We use Simiron polyurea and polyaspartic from the top distributor in the Midwest, and our team has worked with this product since it came out around 2018. We train our installers ourselves, on real floors. Polyurea and polyaspartic have a short working time, so that training shows up in the finished floor.

Verticals and steps

Two add-ons come up on a lot of garages:

• Verticals. Many garages have a concrete or block curb that runs 4 to 6 inches up the wall. We coat that and tie it into the floor so the edge looks finished. It adds square footage, so it shows up as its own line on your quote.
• Steps. The two or three steps up into the house can be coated to match, concrete or wood. You can see coated steps in our project gallery.

We don't coat trim. Wood steps carry no warranty, because wood moves differently than concrete.

Getting your garage ready

• Keep the slab dry for 10 days before install. Don't wash the floor, and don't park wet or snowy tires inside.
• Clear everything off the floor, shelving and stored items included, unless we've agreed on something else.
• Leave the driveway open so we can pull right up and get started.
• Narrow your color to two or three. We bring extra flake and you pick in your own light on install day. Browse our flake colors.

Most two-car garages are ground, coated and cleaned up in one day. You can walk on it within 24 hours, and we'll tell you before we leave when it's ready for your car.

Garage floors across Livingston County

Our shop is on Dorr Road, and garages around Howell, Brighton, Milford and South Lyon make up most of our week. We also coat floors in Pinckney, Hartland, Fenton, Novi and the rest of the towns we serve.

Garage coating questions