HOW HARD IS IT TO DO METALLIC EPOXY VS TRADITIONAL EPOXY SYSTEMS?
We have been getting an increasing amount of callers asking about doing a metallic finish epoxy floor. The first thing we ask is if they have any experience in doing this sort of floor. The answer is always no and that they saw it on YouTube and that it looked fairly easy to do. This is when we tell them it’s not as easy as it looks. It looks easy cause the person doing it most likely does it for a living or has done it many times before. Most of the companies selling metallic epoxy state on their websites or will tell you that their products are not that easy to work with if they’re honest. They say this at the same time as stating that there is no wrong way to do it. While that statement is true because the finish is random, there is definitely good and bad results and sometimes even very bad results. So while it looks like you are just splashing different colors on the floor it really takes skill and experience to get the ratios and the spreading of each color right for it to actually come out looking good rather than an eye sore.
Doing metallic floors are much more labor intensive. You need to grind the floor usually and do a black base coat, then sand it and apply a seal coat and then splash the colors into the seal coat and then sand that when it dries and then you need to apply a topcoat. Some systems use a primer then a black base coat that you sand and then metallic paint that you sand and then a topcoat. Anyway you look at it, it’s a lot more work and the results most likely will not look like what you were expecting. There is skill and artistic talent involved in getting the looks you see on the internet. With traditional epoxy there is no skill level or artistic talent required. Just some good old fashioned elbow grease to clean the floor properly and then just apply the epoxy similar to regular paint. We package our epoxy in turnkey systems to make easy and simple for you to install a complete epoxy flooring job. There is some measuring and mixing involved so that takes a little more consideration than just sticking your roller into the roller tray and rolling the paint on like a semi gloss. But it’s way simpler to do than metallic and 99.999 times out of 100 you are going to be happy with the results. Check out our Epoxy Floor Systems on our Home Page and choose the one that fits your application best or give us a call for some expert advise on which to use.
If you’re truly set on doing metallic, give us a call and we can price our metallic system out for you with a disclaimer that we are not responsible for the results. Also just to let you know that in the New York Tri-State area whenever we get a Metallic job we sub it out to a professional who does only metallic floors. We don’t even let our own professional installers do it! You should take that accordingly.