How To Paint Garage Floor

I love my garage! It’s such a workhorse that stores stuff long-term, holds my project materials and tools, and serves as a place to park my car! My garage building is divided into 2 basically equal sides. The right side is where I park my car and the left side is my shed where we keep paint, the lawnmower, ladder, etc. Unfortunately, I also have some stuff stored along the edges on the garage side as well.

Not ideal, but it still leaves me just enough space to park my hand-me-down Honda Pilot. I also use this space to build things and cut lumber since the open garage door provides lots of light and it’s easy to move the car out. And every time I’d move the car to start a project, I’d think how much more fun it would be if there was a cool designed painted on the floor of the garage.

I wasn’t interested in coating the entire floor, but something that looked like a rug in the center would be perfect! So I hit the interwebs to see if there were any interesting rugs I could copy. My one requirement was that it have straight lines so I could use painter’s tape. I really didn’t want to be free-handing anything! This is the pin I found:

(source: Pinterest.com)

And this is my painter’s tape-friendly version I sketched out to follow along with:

Buuutttt before I could get to the fun part of painting, I had a little prep work to do! You see this concrete was poured almost 5 years ago, but it was never sealed. So it’s got a lot that needs to be cleaned like the classic oil stain and some paint drips here and there. To clean it properly I needed to clear out everything that was sitting on the concrete.

I had picked up this concrete cleaner probably a year ago when it was on clearance. Directions called for pouring it undiluted on really tough stains, like the oil spot. So I started with that.

While it was working away, I mixed up the rest of the cleaner with some water in a pump-up sprayer, also per the instructions. I covered about half of the floor with the solution before using a scrub brush to work it into the concrete. The oil stain just melted away with a little elbow grease!

Once I had made my way across the entire floor, I went back with my garden hose and rinsed the cleaner off really well.

I waited the recommended time, I think 24 hours, before I carried on with my next step, sealing the concrete. This really should have taken place 4 years ago after the concrete had cured. But since it didn’t, I took the time now to do so. It’ll help the paint stay on top of the concrete instead of sinking down into the pores of the concrete. It’ll also be good for future oil stains and paint drips which are bound to happen again!

I had some Thompson’s Water Seal Multi-surface Waterproofer laying around, so I used that in a pump-up sprayer. It was a super quick job to lightly spray the entire surface before letting it dry and cure. (I have a story for another day about how ‘spraying it lightly’ it should not be taken lightly!)

After the proper dry time, I was finally able to map out my rug with my painter’s tape. Spoiler alert~I used about 3 rolls of painter’s tape to create my design. So keep that in mind if you’re doing a similar project. You’ll want to make sure you have plenty of tape of the same width before you start!

First I arbitrarily determined I wanted the rug to be 18 inches from the sides and 36 inches from the front and back of the garage. So I put a small piece of tape at each corner, after measuring, so I was able to mark the true corner with a marker.

Then I carefully taped along the mark, stretched my tape out to the next corner, and gently laid it on the ground before running over the entire length of the tape with my hand to make sure it was good and stuck. This is the best way I’ve found to get a straight line of tape over a long distance. It’s probably best demonstrated in the video at the top of this page.

Once all four edges were down, I applied tape 2 inches in all the way around to create a small border for the whole rug. After that, I slowly laid out my tape to match my design, modifying as needed. I found it helpful to start in the middle and work my way out.

When I was satisfied with the tape and smoothed it all down to prevent seeping, I got the paint out! I used a product I didn’t know existed before this project, a 1-part epoxy that cleans up with water for concrete and garage floors. It’s from Behr and can be tinted to any color, which was really my only requirement when it came to picking paint for this project!

The directions on the paint can say to use a 3/8″ nap roller, so that’s what I did! It went on so well and fairly fast. For whatever reason, I painted one section at a time, checking for places I might have missed as I went along.

By the time I got the roller and tray cleaned up, the paint had dried enough for me to begin peeling the tape up. It was fun to see my design appear as the web-like tape came up!

With all of the tape gone, the only thing left to do was wait for it to fully dry before bringing stuff back in! It’s also recommended to wait 7 days before parking a car on it, so I definitely followed that!

This was a great push to clean out some of my stored items like scrap lumber and reorganize the stuff I wanted to keep, especially utilizing the storage I have in the open rafters above the garage. I have several things I’ve pulled out of trash piles to refinish too but haven’t gotten around to doing so. One of them is this ‘lovely’ cart that’s been refinished into a bar cart just in time for the holidays.

What fun things have you done to spruce up your garage? Would you ever paint anything on your concrete? Share in the comments below. I love hearing from you! Thanks for Checking In! ~Chelsea