Behr interior semi-gloss paint

Go to your local home depot and grab a bucket of the shine level you want but make sure you get the can labeled “Deep Base.” The deep base paind is usually only for really dark or rich colors that they have to mix for you. Fortunately the deep base is also usefull for covering your lower shine level paint. When you open a deep base paint without ant colorants in it, it will look like milky water but will dry clear! So just roll the clear deep base paint over your existing paint and get the durability of a higher shine paint.

Do not do this the other way around…  only put a higher gloss finish over a lower gloss finish paint. Why? because the higher shine a paint has the more enamel content it has. This is what makes the higher shine paints more durable, but also makes it more difficult for other coats of paint to stick to it. Enamel can stick to other enamel and to the more porous flat paints, but flat paints will simply flake off of gloss finishes.

*Almost forgot – I’ve only tried this with BEHR paint, so I don’t know if other paint brands will truly dry compleatly clear.

Anyhow, it’s a whole kit to clean and re-surface your garage floor. Step one is a bag of cleaning product that you’re supposed to mix with a large bucket of water and then scrub your garage floor with. I have a feeling it’s mostly an industrial strength degreasing agent that will make the floor more porous and help the epoxy coating properly bond to the concrete. Really step one is getting all the crap out of your garage and cleaning all the cobwebs out of the corners and sweeping out the saw dust, lol. Next, We mix the quart of epoxy hardener into the gallon bucket of the paint looking stuff and roll it onto the floor. Don’t skimp on the quality of roller you get, you really don’t want little fuzzy stuff on your garage floor forever.

Rust-Oleum Epoxy Shield

While the coating is wet you have the option of sprinkling on the little flakes that come with the kit. The flakes are in various shades of blue and gray and will help hide the dirt you track into your garage. I got the gray colored kit, but the tan color kit also has flakes in shades that will compliment that look as well.

Epoxy garage floor coating

I also have a 5 gallon bucket of Behr one part epoxy garage floor coating in a much lighter shade of gray that I’m going to use for accents. For example I’m going to put an 8 inch wide stripe around where each car should park and the same around my workbench area. It’s basically like having a painted on area rug in the garage. It doesn’t have a real function other than making it look cooler and visually separating the different areas of the garage… and maybe helping her park properly if another girl ever lives with me, hahah. So that shouldn’t be real difficult either, just wait for the first coat to dry, then tape off where I want the stripes and roll over that section again. The only thing that worries me is that the two epoxies might not like each other and I’ll just make a mess with the top coat pealing off in various places and looking ugly. I guess I’ll find out the way I find out everything else,.. the hard way.

I’m hoping that writing this will help to motivate me to actually clean and fix up my garage… so far it’s not working. hmmm.