PecosBill

Untreated concrete is porous and thus easily absorbs contaminates. For a pure work surface, it is fine, but some people like a pretty garage. Much like a car doesn't need a beautiful paint job to be functional, but many people appreciate a pretty car as much as a fast car.

It is getting more and more popular for dealerships to even tile their service areas, a trend that is helping companies like Autostone and Argelith attain incredible growth.

Paul902

Mike, I find on mine that a lot of grit gets caught in the little holes in the surface and thus does not come out as easily as if it were smoother.

JackOlsen

Whoops! I'm getting old!

I wouldn't hold myself up as any kind of model. But I've had .59/sf ceramic tiles from Home Depot in my garage for five years now. My garage cleans up nice and pretty, but I've rolled 500-lb engines across the tile, and 800-lb cabinets; I've dropped tools, welded, pretty much anything. Maybe more to the point, I used the same tile on the top of my hydraulic lift, and it raises my 911 without anything to protect it from the car.

Here I am hitting it with a 4-lb sledge hammer.


It's not slippery. In many ways, it's stronger than the concrete it sits on.

And here's the car sitting on tiles, and the rest of the shop:



Best $300 I ever spent on the garage.

ABCar

Jack, one thing I really like about your garage, besides everything...is the color.


What kind of lights are you using...the look great.
It looks liky you mouted the front ones on the sides just behind the door. I always have this light dead spot in front and that looks like a good solution.

mts

I've done 2 garages. The first one I used a Quickrete 2 stage epoxy. It held up reasonably well over a 6 year period but did have a little hot tire lifting.

When I moved I went with the Griott's product. I like the way it went down better and the initial finshed product looks a bit better. Only time will tell on the hot tire pick-up and longevity of the finish.

JackOlsen

Thanks. The thinking behind the color choice was a very distant memory of going in to work with my engineer father to a machine shop where he worked back in the early seventies. Who knows if it was that color, but it's what seemed right when I was making the choice.

The lights are kind of funny. I made the fixtures themselves are made out of aluminized steel cake pans. I drilled a hole in each one and installed a circline light bulb. Then I welded a set of steel arms to hold them out (in a cantilevered way) from the side walls. This way the garage door can still go up and down without blocking the light. The only trick to the arms was measuring how much the long one would sag under the weight of the two fixtures, and then positioning it in such a way so that when it was finished and carrying the weight, it would be level.



Just about all of the lights in the place are fluorescent, mostly CFLs. I was careful to get bulbs with a color temperature down around 2700-3000K, which gives a warmer, more incandescent-like light. It's a personal preference thing, but I don't like the blue-white light that some guys prefer.

il pirata

Jack can you advise how you prepared the concrete surface for the tile. Everything I have read stresses how important it is to remove old stains etc.

JackOlsen

It's safe to say, I did every single step wrong -- except for the few things I got right. My slab was poured in 1925, so it had 82 years or so of oil stains on it. I also live right near the La Brea Tar Pits, which means the local soil shifts even more than you'd expect from earthquake country. There was a definite wave pattern to my floor. If I had known about self-leveling concrete mix, I could have addressed this. But I didn't know much of anything.



So my floor is still wavy. In the picture above, you can see it under the rear right cabinets and also gauge it by the difference in the threaded feet pins under the table at the mouth of the garage.

Here's how I did it. I had a cheap pressure washer, and I hit the floor with it to get the worst of the oil stains. I probably should have rented a better one. Then I mixed some vinyl patching concrete to address the biggest of the rough transitions and gaps. Someone had extended the garage at some point in its history, and the new piece had sunk down over an inch.



That was pretty much it. As soon as it was dry enough, I started a row of tiles -- again, learning as I went and Googling for help along the way. The essential thing I got right was to 'double butter' the tiles, which means to apply thinset to both the floor and the tile. Any gaps or voids under the tile will allow them to crack.



The other thing I got right was to use a dark brown grout. That meant I didn't have to mess with the expense of the difficulty of epoxy grout. You can't stain brown.



My shoulders still hurt when I think back to the grouting, though.

All done.



That was five years ago. The garage has changed a lot since then, but the tiles have stayed the same.

il pirata

Thanks Jack. Not sure of the date of the concrete pour on my garage but the house was built in 1908. Garage is detached. Great tips above. Do you happen to know the specs on the tile? Just curios if you got by with a low cost product or got a high quality product at low cost. Things such as P.E.I. Wear Rating System, MOH's Rating Scale (Method of Hardness, Break Strength, Coefficient of Friction and what type of density. This usually should be on the box...sometimes some of this may be on the bottom of the tile I think.

JackOlsen

From memory, it was PEI 4 (for hardness) and the coefficient of friction was .60, wet or dry. I don't remember the moisture content, but freezing isn't an issue here.

993/907

You will do best using a porcelain ceramic tile where the color is full depth of the tile body.
Glazed tiles are usually less expensive but will not be as durable.
Something like Granite Fiandre (Gran-neety fee-andre) are top of the line and are often used in upscale auto showrooms.
Check the specs of the porcelain tile you find against the Fiandre specs for a baseline.

A much lower cost alternative would be a curing/hardener agent applied over either new or old slabs; not pretty, but very durable and will resist anything you spill on the floor. The hardener will penetrate something like 1/8" or more into the concrete surface and gets better with age, good stuff.

An acrylic sealer/curing agent will work well but will be dangerously slippery if gas is spilled; oils, brake fluid etc will be okay though.

Gordo

Keadog

Great stuff! We just moved in to the home we built the day before Thanksgiving and I'm not sure what to do with the garage floor (3+ car). I'm no mechanic, but I don't like looking at stained concrete.
Jack, how did you transition from garage to driveway? Bullnose?
Thanks. The lights are awesome. I have no skills so we ended up with three eight foot fluorescents from the electrician. Functional but very not cool.
Thanks again for the great demo.

ABCar

[QUOTE=JackOlsen;10172069]Thanks. The thinking behind the color choice was a very distant memory of going in to work with my engineer father to a machine shop where he worked back in the early seventies. Who knows if it was that color, but it's what seemed right when I was making the choice.

The lights are kind of funny. I made the fixtures themselves are made out of aluminized steel cake pans. I drilled a hole in each one and installed a circline light bulb. Then I welded a set of steel arms to hold them out (in a cantilevered way) from the side walls. This way the garage door can still go up and down without blocking the light. The only trick to the arms was measuring how much the long one would sag under the weight of the two fixtures, and then positioning it in such a way so that when it was finished and carrying the weight, it would be level. END QUOTE

Cake pans...don't you love getting creative? It's almost like the whole point and you get to be mechanical at the same time. Brilliant.

rlme36

There is a stainless steel edging that can be used for the transition, should be plenty for this application. If you don't plan to do any major work, epoxy will make the floor look just as good and may be cheaper, but that really depends on the product you choose and how its installed.

rob

il pirata

I think the issue with epoxy is that the concrete has to be VERY clean otherwise the epoxy will come off quickly.