My floor is a peeling

When I built the detached garage about four years ago I knew I wanted something over the concrete floor.  After researching a few options I decided I would go with an epoxy covering from Epoxy Coat.  As I normally do with any project, I over-researched to ensure that I would apply the coating correctly.  In this case I used the acid etching process first.  Not being satisfied with the results I then rented a diamond floor grinder from Home Depot. 

After applying the epoxy coating in one afternoon and the clear-coat the following day, I had a beautiful covering over my garage floor.

After three years of this floor holding up very well to my abuse, I noticed that I had a section of floor that began to crack and peel.  I figured it must be an area that I had not properly treated and planned on purchasing a patch kit for the area.  I didn't apply any patch right away and the following year I noticed another section starting to peel...  and then a third.  

After pondering why this would be I realized that every time a new section appeared was after a drastic temperature swing in the winter.  Such temperature swings are not common but also not unheard of here in middle Tennessee, swings such as 30 degrees in the morning to 60 degrees in the afternoon.  Since my garage is unheated I thought these drastic temperature swings were likely causing these crack and peel sections.

If epoxy wasn't going to work for me in these conditions I felt confident that my second flooring choice would do: a floating floor from SnapLock industries (specifically GarageTrac and GarageDeck). While not much preparation is actually required to lay a floating floor I did use a floor scraper to remove as much loose epoxy coating as possible.

Laying the new floor was really easy.  Any difficulty I had was simply cutting around the posts for the lift.  While you can use a carpenter's knife for cutting the tiles I found that a Dremel with a large cutting wheel was much faster.  I heard someone describe the process of laying the tiles as "playing with adult Legos" and that's exactly what it felt like.

It took me a few days to lay the floor only because I don't have a lot of contiguous time to tackle the project in one day; the overall project took about 3 hours total.  The end result is a good looking floor that I feel confident can stand-up to the temperature changes as well as handle the occasional dropped tool much better than the epoxy coating.