DIY Garage Slab Repair Video Sakrete Flo-Coat
Sakrete Flo-Coat is a flowable product used to rejuvenate old concrete surfaces like garage slabs and driveways. It's a great alternative to expensive concrete replacement.
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If your garage slab or cement driveway had too much salt applied to it or you have a surface that’s ten or twenty years old and just beginning to look faded and you just want to bring it back to life a little bit. You want to smooth it out. Flo-Coat concrete resurfacer is the product. Flo-Coat is designed to be used on garage slabs and driveways that are structurally sound. If you’ve got a concrete garage slab or driveway that’s a disaster, it’s broken in many, many, pieces and there’s stones popping out, the cure for that is called a jackhammer. There’s nothing’s gonna fix that. Flo-Coat won’t fix it. Nothing’ll fix that. If your garage slab and driveway is in good shape and intact Then Flo-Coat is an excellent product for that.
Garage Slab Repair
If your garage slab or driveway has some cracks in it. What you want to do is repair the cracks first. You can use the Flo-Coat. You’re going to see here in a minute when Lee pours this out, this is a very fluid material. It’s not a true self-leveler, but it is a very fluid product. What I would do if I had some cracks in my garage slab, is I would widen the cracks, depending on what size they are. I would take the same material. I would mix it up a little stiffer. I would fix it with a trowel, and I would fix those cracks first. Then I would apply this. Lee, why don’t you go ahead and pour that out? Mike’s going to come over here. There’s really a couple of ways to do this.
First, you’ll see that right now Mike, in his hand, has got a gauge rake. For those of you who are in the flooring business, you’re familiar with gauge rakes. You just set the cam on either side to give you the exact same distance. If you don’t happen to have a gauge rake however, you can use a trowel. So Mike’s gonna shift over here now, just to grab a trowel, I mean, excuse me, grab a squeegee. The thing that I really like about Sakrete Flo-Coat is, I’ve been playing with concrete for a lot of years now. And the difficulty that I have with my age, and my knees, and my back, is I’m really tired of getting down on my hands and knees to do any kind of repairs.
Garage Slab Repair Video
The nice thing about this squeegee is it allows you, you can see Mike is able to just kind of pull that. He’s not getting down on his hands and knees. And the nice thing about that is how much territory you can cover in a relatively short period of time. If you were going to do this—I can personally cover a pretty good-sized garage slab, as long as somebody else is doing the mixing, and I’m running out of the gauge or the squeegee, I can cover a very large area in a fairly short period of time. You need to pour a little more in there maybe?
The coverage on this—we had that gauge rake set at an 1/8th of an inch. The coverage at 1/8th of an inch for a 40-pound bag, is about 36 square feet. That means you’re looking at about 50 cents a square foot for the material itself. The labor, the time that it takes to do it, very, very quick. Now at the moment, we have just a little bit on the stiffer side, and the reason we do is so that we don’t make a huge mess. If you’re doing a job, and you’re out on the jobsite, and you’ve got a nice flat surface, I would wet it up a little more than this, and let it flow. If you’ve got a surface that you’re doing that’s got some pitch to it—let’s say you’re doing a garage slab or driveway, patios tend to be flat, but driveways often have quite a slant to them. What you want to do then is either one, stiffen it up, or two, go ahead and wet it up, but before you pour it out, let it stiffen in the container. Now, it’s not a fast-setting material, but it will most certainly begin to stiffen up after about 15 or 20 minutes.
Now, if you’ll notice, Mike is continuing to work on this, and each time he does, it has self-healing properties. The material is kind of flowing back in on itself, so when he’s done, you won’t see squeegee marks. You wouldn’t see gauge rake marks. If you’re doing a large job, if you’ll notice, when Mike picks that squeegee up, there’s a little bit dropping off of there. If you were doing a real big job, periodically I would take a rag or something and clean that off. The product is about a 4500 psi material, so it’s plenty strong. It is designed for use, I would say, in residential areas, garage slabs and driveways. That’s pretty good, Mike. That’ll do the trick.
I would not use it in an area where you’re going to put heavy industrial traffic in a warehouse, like with a forklift or something. But for residential garages where you’re pouring something subject to light car traffic, light truck traffic, an excellent material. The preparation—I was talking with this gentleman before we got started—the preparation required for this—if your driveway or your garage slab is really in good shape, then what I would do is I would simply use a garden hose. If you’ve got something you need to get up—you’ve got sap, you’ve got oil, you’ve got that sort of thing—then I would consider pressure-washing the garage slab before I would do that.
So there’s really two ways to do this. One is if you’re just trying to cover, and you do it like this. Now, if you want to really make it look nicer, you want to make a concrete garage slab look like it has, like it is a paver patio, then you can spray the material. Mike and Lee right now—go ahead gentlemen—are going to spray this material. I mentioned earlier—some of you weren’t here—these boards that over here—there’s three boards right over here. If you look at the far side of those when you leave, you’ll see the finished product for what Lee is going to do right now. Simply taking a spray gun that is really designed for shooting plaster on walls, but we’ve taken these—we’ve taken it and turned the nozzle so that it sprays down, and Lee is using a circular motion and he’s simply spraying the stencil that we have there.
After he’s done, we’re going to pull that stencil. Now, the nice thing about this—the coverage out of a 40-pound bag, by spraying like this is between 150 and 180 square feet. That’s a lot of coverage. When you look at it that way, the raw material cost is only about ten to twelve cents. A very economical way to do this. You all right for material there? As you can see, he’s continuing with a circular motion. There’s a couple of things you can do with that when he’s done. One of the things you can do is simply leave it rough. It depends on the texture that you’re trying to achieve. If you want something with a little bit of texture to it, then you go ahead and leave it the way that it goes down.
If, for some reason, you wanted it very smooth, you could take this thing we typically use, just pull it across that paper—it’s a paper stencil—before you pull that stencil up, and it’ll put a nice smooth finish on. I know when people have used it around swimming pools, and around swimming pools, you might want a smoother surface. But if you’re looking for traction, actually like at ___’s house, they did it around a swimming pool and they left it rough. They said it’s really much better, because when the kids are running around, you don’t have any—quite the slip hazard that you do when you’re around the swimming pool. Need some more material, or are we good?
After he’s finished with that, he’s going to immediately pull that stencil up. Oh, ___ compressor on. There’s a sign on the back of the panel over here that we’ve built, and it says, ‘You are limited only to your imagination.’ What we’re doing right now—you can see on the countertop right over here is a box of factory color. That’s what Lee is spraying right now, is that red color. That’s an iron oxide pigment. We sell a half a dozen different colors. The nice thing about this is you’ll see some of the ones that Lee did in the back are very creative. He has used different colors. He’s used multiple colors. He’s done all sorts of different things. Lee, I don’t know whether it’s possible for you to stand up there and tilt that board up. Is that—for the folks in the back to be able to see a little bit?
This is something that is easy to do. It’s economical to do. You can make the material looser or tighter depending on what kind of look you want. Right now you can see we’ve got kind of some little larger blobs. You can put it back down—stand it up against the—very good. You can see on there, there’s some blotches. We did that intentionally. If you didn’t want those, you can make the material a little bit looser. You’re really only limited to your imagination. You can use different colors. Unfortunately, because of our limited space here, we weren’t able to do this. But one of the things that can be done is now to immediately take another color, and spray on top of it using a much lighter pattern than what Lee did here, where he saturated the whole thing. If you do that, you’ll see that on those boards back there. It really makes it pop when you put a second color on.
Yeah. If you’re doing a—Lee just pointed out those larger blobs, if you’re doing what we call a knockdown, where we’re just going to grab it with a squeegee and just pull it down. The gizmo that we’re using right over there is that hopper, is available in a number of places. You can get it at Depot. You can get it at Lowe’s. Some hardware stores have it. Kraft Tool Company has it, just right down the aisle here. Not hard to get a hold of. They’re in the $50 range. So you’re not talking about an expensive proposition here, for taking a surface—a worn, tired, concrete surface—and turning it into something that looks like that. There’s really not a lot of time, and not a lot of expense. Fairly easy to do-
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