A lot of home improvement projects have a DIY option, but the associated perks of doing your own remodeling come at a cost. Installing your own home flooring means you don’t have to pay for labor, but you do have to spend hours pushing planks and tiles into position yourself. You can update your plumbing with more custom choices and small details, but you face the risk of water damage and incorrect installation. Every renovation project includes a trade-off of costs and benefits, but many times DIY options have far more benefits than costs.
But some projects need products that aren’t available in big box stores. They need special tools that aren’t available for rent, use strong chemical materials that aren’t available to private consumers, or involve licensing requirements. If you want to protect your garage floor with a strong floor coating, you don’t just have to make the trade-off of increased time and effort for a DIY option. You also have to make do with weaker materials. Most garage flooring kits include epoxy instead of the professionally standard polyurea or polyaspartic materials. That matters because:
Polyaspartic floor coatings are far more durable.
Garage floors come into contact without a lot of chemicals. They also need to be strong enough to withstand the pressure of vehicles driving over the surface and the strain of extreme temperature changes. These hazards are precisely why you may be looking into a garage floor coating in the first place: your unprotected concrete is showing signs of wear and damage.
While epoxy floor coatings can mitigate some of the damage, it falls short of polyaspartic materials. One of the biggest differences is in terms of flexibility. When epoxy cures, it forms a hard but inflexible layer that can’t bend and shift with your concrete. Your foundation slabs expand and contract throughout the seasons. Temperature fluctuations, freezing and thawing moisture content in the underlying material, and even minute shifts as your foundation settles all make your concrete move. An inflexible epoxy layer will eventually start to crack away. Even worse, it could hold tight to the top layer of your garage’s concrete and make that layer separate from the rest of the slab.
The flexibility also helps prevent against chips and damage from impact. Continuous pressure from your car tires would wear down an epoxy layer and, if it’s faced with too much pressure between the tires and the underlying slab, the material will crack or split. But polyurea’s flexibility means it can bounce back.
While you need all of the unyielding protection that coatings offer, you need durable materials that aren’t so rigid they cause new problems. Polyaspartic floor coatings also give your garage additional protections through its durability, including:
UV stability
If you have windows in your garage, you may have already seen how UV radiation can bleach out the color and turn white or light colors a dull yellow. But polyaspartic floor coatings don’t have the same weakness so you can choose whatever color combination you want.
Resistance to heat damage
During the summer, high heat can make asphalt surfaces bubble and melt. While other driveway materials have less visible reactions to heat, the damage is still developing. Hot tires, which hold heat from friction and the environment, can also wear down epoxy over time. It can also pull away the sealant, a problem called hot-tire pickup. But polyurea has a higher resistance.
Resistance to chemicals
Floor coatings need to do more than prevent physical damage. They also have to withstand chemical damage to be effective. Polyaspartic coatings repel chemical damage better than epoxy. It can even resist methylene chloride, the primary solvent in paint stripper.
Polyaspartic floor coatings last longer and stand up better to a wider range of hazards. Epoxies just aren’t as durable or as flexible, and that means your garage won’t be as well protected. Go to PolyTek Surface Coatings to find the right style for your garage and experts who will work with you for a perfect custom finish.