Painting Garage Floors
Many of you have been painting your garages, including their floors, and some of you have had problems with the floor paint peeling after a short period of use. There is a popular misconception that the peeling, especially of epoxy based paints, is caused by “hot tires” that melt the paint beneath them. However, this is not entirely true.
Warm tires cause the floor paint to first expand with the heat and then contract as the tires cool. After a number of cycles of the expansion and contraction, under the considerable weight of the car, the paint works loose from the surface of the concrete causing the unsightly peeling. This can happen with any type of paint.
Before painting, the floors must be thoroughly cleaned to give the paint every opportunity it needs to adhere to the concrete surface. Dirt and oil stains also have to be removed entirely. Sanding the garage floor with a sander to rough it up helps the paint adhere. Some painters use an acid treatment to etch the concrete for better adhesion.
However, there are times when all of this preparation does not work and the paint still peels under the tires. So, what to do?
Warm tires cause the floor paint to first expand with the heat and then contract as the tires cool. After a number of cycles of the expansion and contraction, under the considerable weight of the car, the paint works loose from the surface of the concrete causing the unsightly peeling. This can happen with any type of paint.
Before painting, the floors must be thoroughly cleaned to give the paint every opportunity it needs to adhere to the concrete surface. Dirt and oil stains also have to be removed entirely. Sanding the garage floor with a sander to rough it up helps the paint adhere. Some painters use an acid treatment to etch the concrete for better adhesion.
However, there are times when all of this preparation does not work and the paint still peels under the tires. So, what to do?
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A simple, and relatively inexpensive solution, is to place small parking mats on the garage floor where the tires come to rest. They insulate the paint from the warm tires and help preserve the beauty of your beautiful, new paint job regardless of what type of material you choose to use.
Check Your Garage Doors Frequently
Unit Owner Claudette Sylvester reminds us to inspect our garage doors frequently. She told us one of the bolts that connects her door to the lifting mechanism fell out and the other one was only a few threads away from doing the same. As you can see in the attached photo the arrows actually point to two places where this can happen. So, from time-to-time, inspect these bolts to make sure that they are still in place and fastened tightly.
