Good day,
I thought I would offer my experience and initial impressions of some Ecotile 7mm PVC garage floor tiles that I recently fitted to my garage. Might be useful for anyone else considering these for their own garage/workshop.
Background:
I had been agonising over what to do about my garage floor for literally years, pretty much since we moved to this house. The floor is solid concrete and for a domestic garage at least, is quite flat and in reasonably good condition. It had been painted, I assume not long after it had been built some 20+ years ago and the paint was in a bad way, chipping off in large areas, leaving just bare concrete which kicked up so much dust and grit.
I considered all sorts of options but settled on these interlocking floor tiles for a few reasons:
- The main attraction was being able to do a section at a time and not have to wait for adhesives or paint to dry or cure.
- If you balls up installing them, you can just lift them up and start again
- at 490mm square you can cover a lot of ground in fairly short order.
- Floor surface prep consists of a sweep and a vacuum.
- If I manage to mangle one, they should be easy to replace.
They seemed to offer a few benefits over most of the alternatives that I had considered but what sealed the deal for me was Costco dropping the price to £19.99 for 4 tiles (4 tiles being just under 1 square metre) so I pulled the trigger and placed my order. The only limiting factor of ordering from Costco was them only offering 2 colours, I would have quite liked a light grey but to get that I would have been paying closer to £35 for 4 tiles from a different supplier which I couldn't justify, so from Costco's choice of black or anthracite, I went with anthracite.
So the garage floor started out looking like this:
That is probably the worst of it, but most of the floor was like that.
You can see more of how bad it was when I took a picture of laying the tiles out to figure out the best place to start from:
I got my starting point figured out, I noticed that I would have some tricky cuts round the back feet of the ramp but decided that was a compromise I was willing to make to get a neat edge and nice cuts around the side and back walls.
It took me most of a Saturday to clear out a section at a time, lay and hammer down the tiles and then move on to the next section. By Saturday night I had it looking like this:
I made a bit of an error by watching a video on YouTube about how to install these tiles and I am sure I remember it saying you can cut them easily with a Stanley knife, well even with a fresh blade, you would need to have the upper body of a silver back gorilla to stand any chance of cutting these tiles with a Stanley knife. When I searched YouTube again I actually found a video from Ecotile where they can be seen using an enormous guillotine device to make their cuts. I had to use what I had around me so opted for a 1mm cutting disc on an angle grinder, it left a cut edge that I thought was perfectly acceptable and it allowed me to do the complex cuts on the back feet of the ramp pretty easily:
The cut edge left by the angle grinder.
The install instructions suggest leaving a gap of 5mm around edges but I wanted it a bit tighter around the ramp feet, so far so good and it isn't like they sit in direct sunlight so I think I'll get away with it.
Another error I made was ordering enough tiles to cover my floor area +5% contingency, turns out I should have ordered 10% contingency as I ended up a few tiles short! I ordered some more tiles and another week later they turned up and so this week I got the last cuts done and finished:
The whole job took me most of a weekend, that included several hours spent pulling everything out of the garage and then putting it all back in again. Trouble is now the back wall looks awful so, painting that will be my next job. My toolboxes also now look very down at heel when rolled back on to a nice shiny floor so I might, in the fullness of time consolidate my 3 old tool boxes into one big one.
I am so far very pleased with the tiles, they were easy to work with and they have achieved what I wanted from this floor which was to get it one colour and stop it kicking up dust. I have already spilled old engine oil on them and it just wipes off, the heavy things that I have left in one spot seem to leave a small indentation that goes away again after a short while. Other benefits are that they reflect more light than the old painted floor so it is brighter when the lights are on, also I can roll things across it much easier, the rough concrete floor was a pain for rolling heavy things across with cast iron wheels like engine cranes and transmission jacks, they made SO much noise!
I hope this helps anyone considering these for their own space. I might return to this post in a year or so to report on how they have held up.
That's it for now.
I thought I would offer my experience and initial impressions of some Ecotile 7mm PVC garage floor tiles that I recently fitted to my garage. Might be useful for anyone else considering these for their own garage/workshop.
Background:
I had been agonising over what to do about my garage floor for literally years, pretty much since we moved to this house. The floor is solid concrete and for a domestic garage at least, is quite flat and in reasonably good condition. It had been painted, I assume not long after it had been built some 20+ years ago and the paint was in a bad way, chipping off in large areas, leaving just bare concrete which kicked up so much dust and grit.
I considered all sorts of options but settled on these interlocking floor tiles for a few reasons:
- The main attraction was being able to do a section at a time and not have to wait for adhesives or paint to dry or cure.
- If you balls up installing them, you can just lift them up and start again
- at 490mm square you can cover a lot of ground in fairly short order.
- Floor surface prep consists of a sweep and a vacuum.
- If I manage to mangle one, they should be easy to replace.
They seemed to offer a few benefits over most of the alternatives that I had considered but what sealed the deal for me was Costco dropping the price to £19.99 for 4 tiles (4 tiles being just under 1 square metre) so I pulled the trigger and placed my order. The only limiting factor of ordering from Costco was them only offering 2 colours, I would have quite liked a light grey but to get that I would have been paying closer to £35 for 4 tiles from a different supplier which I couldn't justify, so from Costco's choice of black or anthracite, I went with anthracite.
So the garage floor started out looking like this:
That is probably the worst of it, but most of the floor was like that.
You can see more of how bad it was when I took a picture of laying the tiles out to figure out the best place to start from:
I got my starting point figured out, I noticed that I would have some tricky cuts round the back feet of the ramp but decided that was a compromise I was willing to make to get a neat edge and nice cuts around the side and back walls.
It took me most of a Saturday to clear out a section at a time, lay and hammer down the tiles and then move on to the next section. By Saturday night I had it looking like this:
I made a bit of an error by watching a video on YouTube about how to install these tiles and I am sure I remember it saying you can cut them easily with a Stanley knife, well even with a fresh blade, you would need to have the upper body of a silver back gorilla to stand any chance of cutting these tiles with a Stanley knife. When I searched YouTube again I actually found a video from Ecotile where they can be seen using an enormous guillotine device to make their cuts. I had to use what I had around me so opted for a 1mm cutting disc on an angle grinder, it left a cut edge that I thought was perfectly acceptable and it allowed me to do the complex cuts on the back feet of the ramp pretty easily:
The cut edge left by the angle grinder.
The install instructions suggest leaving a gap of 5mm around edges but I wanted it a bit tighter around the ramp feet, so far so good and it isn't like they sit in direct sunlight so I think I'll get away with it.
Another error I made was ordering enough tiles to cover my floor area +5% contingency, turns out I should have ordered 10% contingency as I ended up a few tiles short! I ordered some more tiles and another week later they turned up and so this week I got the last cuts done and finished:
The whole job took me most of a weekend, that included several hours spent pulling everything out of the garage and then putting it all back in again. Trouble is now the back wall looks awful so, painting that will be my next job. My toolboxes also now look very down at heel when rolled back on to a nice shiny floor so I might, in the fullness of time consolidate my 3 old tool boxes into one big one.
I am so far very pleased with the tiles, they were easy to work with and they have achieved what I wanted from this floor which was to get it one colour and stop it kicking up dust. I have already spilled old engine oil on them and it just wipes off, the heavy things that I have left in one spot seem to leave a small indentation that goes away again after a short while. Other benefits are that they reflect more light than the old painted floor so it is brighter when the lights are on, also I can roll things across it much easier, the rough concrete floor was a pain for rolling heavy things across with cast iron wheels like engine cranes and transmission jacks, they made SO much noise!
I hope this helps anyone considering these for their own space. I might return to this post in a year or so to report on how they have held up.
That's it for now.
