Summer is ending this month, and that means the rainy season before winter is about to start. One of the best things you can do to get your house ready for winter, and for all of the extreme weather Minnesota has, for years to come is to take a second look at your garage floor. If it’s untreated concrete, then it’s not the safest surface you could have for parking your car. Here’s why:

1. Your garage floor doesn’t protect the people walking on it. Whenever people think about the most dangerous room in the house, they typically think of a bathroom or a kitchen because of all the opportunities to slip and fall. But during the winter or after a particularly icy storm, any room of your home can have a slick floor and the garage is no exception. Your car’s tires bring in ice, water, and road salt that, no matter how cold your garage is, will result in a slippery puddle of melted water both as you get out of your car in the evening and when you get into your car in the morning. But a full chip epoxy floor offers a sturdy, skid resistant surface that your shoes can grip no matter how wet the surface is. The texture is safe for your shoes and tires, and it will help you and your family safely navigate the floor without you have to think twice. 
2. Bare concrete can soak up dangerous chemicals and stay stained. That same puddle of melted ice and road salt would seep into your untreated concrete floor. Water that continually melts and freezes in the concrete can start or expand fractures in the material, and the chemicals your tires grabbed from the road’s surface outside will stay in your concrete and garage. If you treat your garage floor with an epoxy coating, these chemicals can’t seep into the concrete or wick into any cracks. Epoxy floors are easy to maintain because the coating leaves the surface nonporous. You can sweep, mop, or wash away any spills or drips without them leaving behind a stain or eating into the floor. 
3. Concrete can’t stand up to day-to-day use. If you check the corners of your garage or the edges of concrete steps, you’re sure to find hairline cracks and crumbling corners. This is especially true in Minnesota, where rapid temperature changes can make the concrete floor shift and start to crack. But an epoxy coating moves with a settling floor while holding it together to reduce damage and crumbling edges. Even the process of installing your new floor coating helps make the floor stronger: one of the final steps of preparing your underlying concrete surface is removing the latent layer of concrete, a layer approximately one sixteenth of an inch thick that was weakened by the initial curing process of setting the concrete slab. Removing this layer not only gets rid of the concrete most likely to chip and crack, it leaves behind only strong, porous concrete that the epoxy mixture can bind tightly to.

Most garages have an untreated concrete floor. But just by adding an epoxy layer, you can add a great deal of value and safety to your home. The garage can be one of the most dangerous rooms in your home to slip in, and having chemicals seep untreated into the floor can present a longer-lasting hazard than slick floors. Bare concrete floors also will be crisscrossed with hairline fractures no matter how secure the foundation is will show the age of the house in a bad light when it comes time to sell the property. If you remember slipping and falling in your garage or you’ve seen hairline cracks that you want to treat and prevent, contact PolyTek Surface Coatings about the next steps in getting an epoxy floor in your garage.