Flake Epoxy Flooring Sydney

It starts with a coloured base coat of epoxy. While that base is still wet, coloured vinyl flake is thrown into it by hand so the chips land, settle and stick. Once the base has cured, the surface gets scraped back to knock off any sharp edges, and then the whole floor is sealed under a clear polyurethane sealer.

What that means for you is a solid, sealed surface with texture and pattern built into it, rather than a coat of paint sitting on bare concrete. The flake is suspended inside the coating, so it wears the way the coating wears.

The flake itself is a thin chip of coloured vinyl. It comes in different sizes, from small specks that read almost like a speckled stone, up to broad chips that give you a chunky, obvious pattern. Most garage floors sit somewhere in the middle. The size of the chip changes the look far more than most people expect, so it is worth looking at a sample in daylight before you settle on anything.

Concrete looks flat and clean, but the top skin of a slab is usually closed off and often has a curing agent or old sealer sitting on it. If you coat straight over that, you are gluing the floor to a layer that was never going to hold.

• The slab is checked for moisture first. APC asks for concrete that is at least 28 days old with moisture below 4 percent before anything goes on.
• Then it is ground back to clean, open concrete, which gives the epoxy something to key into and takes off old paint, glue or adhesive residue.
• Chips, gouges, control joints and cracks get filled and made good once the surface is open.
• Oil stains are dealt with properly, because oil sitting in the pores of the slab will keep pushing back against a coating.

After that the primer and base coat go down, the flake is broadcast into it, and the floor is left to cure. Then it is scraped, vacuumed and sealed. A standard garage is done in a day on site, with bigger floors running two or three, and Evo’s working figure is 72 hours before the car goes back in.

A single garage flake epoxy floor starts from $1,800 and a double garage from $2,500, with the preparation, crack filling, primer, base coat, flake and sealer all included. Moisture in the slab, a lot of cracks to fill, or old paint that needs a second round of grinding move the price, and we confirm the figure in writing at the free on-site quote. You can see what epoxy flooring costs for every floor type on one page.

We are happy to talk through the state of your slab before we quote it. An older Hills District garage with a patched slab and a few oil stains is a different floor to prepare than a new build in Box Hill or The Ponds where the concrete has never had anything on it.

• Flake hides the small marks a garage floor collects. A plain, solid colour floor shows every scuff, every drip and every hairline imperfection in the slab underneath, while a flake floor has pattern and tonal variation across the whole surface for those marks to blend into.
• The texture gives you grip. Once the flake is broadcast and sealed the surface has a slight texture rather than being completely smooth, which matters when wet tyres come in on a rainy day.
• The space is easier to keep clean. Sealed concrete does not hold dust the way raw concrete does, so a broom or a blower gets most of it and a mop handles the rest.