Garage Upgrades

I've been working on my new garage.
I painted it blue and white.
Next, I had an epoxy-coated floor installed. It has a 15 year warranty. It's more comfortable and cleaner when working under a car. Fluids clean up easily, and it looks great. Everyone who sees it loves it. This was a big project and it was too much DiY for me, so I hired a local company.
Then, I bought a gigantic set of cabinets and installed them. It turns out, garage floors are designed to slope towards the door, so I had to level the two tall cabinets carefully so that the workbench and cabinets which join them would be perfectly flat.. and they are. I also had to take care than when the cabinet door closest to the garage door was fully open, it wouldn't hit the garage door. It's all within an inch or two, but never touches.
I ran a new power outlet. This was easy; there was an outlet on the other side wall, so I just needed to punch a hole in the wall and run a little bit of Romex from there into a new outlet box. But now I have my battery chargers inside one of the cabinets and I just pop the battery out of my power tools and charge them right up.
I installed LED lighting in the garage and also inside the cabinets, and I replaced the old, loud garage opener with a belt-driven Chamberlain unit. This has all the programming features. My phone reminds me if the door has been open too long, and I can check its status from anywhere and close it remotely. Amazon can open the door to drop off deliveries.
I like this garage a lot.

 

For heaven's sakes, if I kept count, I wouldn't have done it.
There are a lot of vendors of those cabinets. I chose the "heavy duty" version, not standard. The cost depends upon how many cabinets you install, and that in turn depends on how big your garage is.

The garage opener was about $200. Totally worth it. I probably paid about $100 or $200 for paint, and about $150 for the lighting. I like bright lights when I'm working on cars. Luckily, there's a shed out back for the gardening tools, so I don't need that stuff in my garage. It's a two-car garage that will very barely hold two cars... so for me, it's a very roomy one-car garage.

Here's a photo with the Chamberlain door opener. It was very easy to install. It has lighting which automatically comes on when I open the garage door or from motion. I put LED bulbs in but I also have very bright LED fixtures overhead when I want to work. Here in Oregon, we get gray skies for a lot of the year, so bright lighting is a must for your sanity.

You can also see I removed one of the dividers over the windows in the garage, but now I have them all removed. Don't tell my HOA.

 

Good heavens, it wasn't close to $10,000. The floor and big cabinet were the only large expenses. I already had drywall up, so that was all DiY.

 

It took two professionals a full day to do this.
They begin by using a 600 pound, diamond-bladed grinder to grind the concrete down to a completely fresh, porous surface. Vacuum. Then they grind out all cracks and fill them. Wait to dry, then grind that flush. Vacuum. Only after hours of meticulous prep are they ready for the first of three or four applications.

Is it worth it? I think so. But it’s not cheap.

If you do it yourself, you can rent these grinders from Home Depot, but you need to be that thorough and you need to know about the curing times and stuff. A LOT of DIY’ers on YouTube have had these floors peel up after a year because the floor beneath wasn’t prepped correctly. You can’t cut corners on it.

I shot a time lapse of the installation.

 

Because I don't feel comfortable with questions like that. I'm happy to share my garage but I don't talk to people about how much salary I earn, what I pay for my cars, and so forth. Some people make more, others make less, and I want to associate with people here based on our common Prius ownership, not on our common incomes or wealth levels. I wish you could respect that.

 

I looked at every flooring option and this seemed to be the only good option. Take a look at the floor installation video... it's a LOT of work and if you don't know how to do it properly, you get the joy of doing it twice.
There are various floor coverings, like rubber tiles, etc., but they can still get expensive and they aren't nearly as durable. The Rust-oleum coating kits don't seem to work very well. So you could paint it; I think that's the easiest bet for a low-cost solution.

 

I do like those shelves... Did you notice the LED lighting inside that cabinet?

I bought an oil catch can and that Moroso bracket, but the bracket is too large for the can, so it's sitting there until I need it for who-knows-what.

Speaking of shelves... if you look at the first photo, there are two shelves and a drawer. Then, there are three shelves. What happened was that one of the tall cabinet doors arrived with a small dent. I nicely asked them to ship me a new door. They didn't have any in stock so they agreed to my request for two additional shelves. (What's that? You can't see the dent? Exactly... It's there, but it's not a big deal).

 

Technically… the installer said it’s something better than epoxy, called polyurea. I’m not a chemist, so I don’t know if it’s better or not. I sure hope they didn’t coat my garage in urine!