If you’ve just decided to give yourself a new garage floor, congratulations and good luck. If you’re careful and follow the instructions, you’ll get a great-looking, long-lasting floor that your neighbors will envy. Part of the fun of a diy garage floor is choosing which product to use. We settled on Rust-Oleum’s RockSolid polycuramine, for reasons that we’ll explain in a different post. Here, we just want to give you a useful list of all the other stuff you might need before you begin.
The RockSolid garage floor kits come with a several items that are necessary to do the job, including the 2-part polycuramine pouch, etching material, chips, and a foam roller. However, as we learned in our project, you’ll want to have a few tools and other products on hand to get a good (and less-stressful) end result. Now, depending on your own garage floor’s actual condition, you may not have to get everything we did, but here are the 18 items we needed in addition to the kit.
We’ve organized this list into items you’ll need for concrete repair, floor prep, and product application. The first item, however, is something you’ll need for all phases:
- Nitrile gloves — Protect your hands! There are a number of chemicals in this project that you want to keep off your skin.
Concrete repair
Things you’ll need to patch cracks, divots and pits in your old floor.
- Concrete patch and repair — As with the degreaser, there are multiple concrete patch products. But, we did not want to take any chances, so we went with Rustoleum’s brand for patching. The two-part patch gave great results: it provided plenty of working time to get the material in place and smoothed out, was extremely hard once dry, and had virtually no shrinkage. (The package literature does state that you may need a second coat over larger patches, so be prepared if you do have large and/or deep areas to patch). Try to do a good job of smoothing the patch with your putty knife to minimize post-patch sanding.
- Drill with wire-brush attachment — We had extensive cracks in our floor that had previously been filled with a mystery substance. The wire brush attachment made it much easier to thoroughly clean out the cracks so we could come back and fill them with the right stuff.
- Narrow putty knife — We used a 1¼” putty knife to apply patch to floor cracks
- 6″ putty knife — A wider knife was necessary for patching larger divots and pitted areas.
- Rubbing alcohol — This is for cleaning your tools of the concrete patch. You’ll want to clean in between every round of patching.
- Random orbital sander with 60-grit pads — The cured patch material is sandable, but not easily sandable, so a random orbital sander makes it much easier to smooth down any imperfections in your patches. We also did a light sanding over the entire surface of our patches to improve adhesion.
Floor prep
Things you’ll need to clean and etch your concrete floor
- Floor Degreaser — There are several different brands that you can use to thoroughly degrease your floor. We went with Rustoleum’s product, assuming that it was our best bet to ensure we did the job right. We needed two gallons, and it’s pricey It did not let us down.
- Stiff bristle-brush broom — This is essential for both the etching and degreasing step, to ensure that you get to all of the dirt and grime, and that the entire floor surface is properly etched.
- Wire brush and scraper — While the drill attachment made for speedy work on our cracks, we kept noticing new paint spots as we worked on prep, so it has helpful to have a hand tool to quickly do spot scraping.
- Squeegee Pole— This is super helpful for getting water out of the garage after cleaning, degreasing, and etching. It will allow your floors to dry more quickly, so you can get the job done faster.
Product Application
Things you’ll need to get your floor coating down.
- 9″ roller carriage — The kit includes a 9″ foam roller, but of course, you’ll need to put that roller on a standard roller carriage. Tip: Make sure to remove the foam roller from the carriage as soon as you finish applying the product. Otherwise, you’ll wind up with a roller that’s permanently attached to your carriage.
- Extension pole — In order to apply the polycuramine while standing, you’ll need an extension pole that screws in to your roller carriage. Before you buy one, check your yard tool handles…you probably have something that’s compatible with the roller carriage. We used the handle from a push broom.
- Extra Chips — we didn’t like the blue color in the chips that came with the kit, but you can buy bags of chips separately in several different color combos. The individual bags also have more chips than the ones in the kit, so this also eliminated running-out-of-chips anxiety.
- Plastic 4″ planter pot — You can sprinkle chips on to your floor with your hand, but we found that shaking them through the bottom of a plastic plant pot made it easier to get an even distribution. You can come up with your own improvised tool for this. Just make sure to practice your technique beforehand, and mix your chips so that the smaller flakes don’t all wind up at the bottom of the bag.
- Painters tape — Get decent tape because you’ll need to tape a clean-looking line at the entrance to your garage.
- 5-gallon bucket — You have to be careful not to get the RockSolid product on to anything besides your floor. Having a bucket nearby gives you a place for holding the bag of polycuramine while you are rolling, and to rest your roller on while pouring the product.
- Foam brushes (multi-pak) — Rust-Oleum’s instructions call for a nylon bristle brush for cutting in edges, but we found that mineral spirits would not clean a brush, and disposable foam brushes worked great. Having narrow brushes also made it much easier to get into tight spots.
Hope this list helps with your project. To learn more about our DIY garage floor experience, check out our post on what we learned putting down a Rocksolid polycuramine floor. Did you find something missing on our list? Let us know in the comments section below.
