One of the questions we get most often from new clients is some version of “what does an epoxy job actually involve?” People see the finished product on Instagram and assume it’s a one-day spray-and-go process. The reality is that good epoxy is patient work, and most of what makes the difference between a floor that lasts twenty years and one that delaminates in three happens before the resin ever comes out of the bucket. We finished a job in Urangan a couple of weeks ago that was a textbook example of how the prep, the product choice, and the install all have to come together — so I thought I’d take readers behind the scenes on that one.
The Urangan brief
The clients had bought a tidy brick-and-tile home a few streets back from the Urangan marina, and the property included a generous double garage that doubled as a boat shed. Their tinny lived in there during the week, alongside two cars, a couple of bikes, and the usual collection of fishing rods, eskies and tackle boxes. The slab was original — at least 25 years old by our guess — and showed everything you’d expect from years of saltwater drips, oil stains, and the occasional dropped weight. They’d looked at painting it, looked at tiling it, and finally landed on epoxy after talking to a neighbour who’d done their own garage two summers earlier. They wanted something that could handle the boat coming home dripping wet, the cars dragging in salt and sand, and still look good when guests came around for a barbecue.
What we found in the slab
Day one is always assessment. We moisture-tested the slab in three locations using a calcium chloride test and a digital concrete moisture meter. The results came back borderline — not as dry as we’d like in a perfect world, but within the range our moisture-tolerant primer system can handle. There were two existing oil stains that had soaked in deeply, a hairline crack running diagonally about 1.2 metres long, and one section near the door where the previous owners had clearly patched the slab with a quick-set product that hadn’t bonded well. None of this was a deal-breaker, but every issue had to be addressed properly before any epoxy went down.
The diamond grind
This is the step that most DIY epoxy attempts skip — and the reason most of those jobs fail within a year or two. We diamond-ground the entire slab to a CSP3 (concrete surface profile) finish, taking off about 1mm of the surface to expose fresh concrete underneath. This isn’t optional in our process. It’s how the primer mechanically grips the slab. You can’t get the same bond from acid etching, no matter what the YouTube videos say. The grinding took the better part of day one, including dust extraction with a HEPA vacuum so the clients didn’t end up with concrete dust through the rest of the house. We also used the grinder to chase out the diagonal crack, which we then filled with a flexible polyurea joint filler so it wouldn’t telegraph through the finished floor.
Choosing the flake blend
The clients wanted something that would hide the inevitable scuffs, salt stains and tackle-box drips, but they also didn’t want a floor that looked like a workshop. We brought half a dozen flake blend samples to the second site visit and laid them out on the slab in their actual lighting conditions — late afternoon sun coming through the open roller door, and the cool fluorescent strip lights that take over once the door’s down. They went with a warm grey base and a black-grey-cream flake blend, which we knew from experience would mask everything and still read as deliberate when the cars and boat were in. For more on how to think about that choice, our piece on metallic vs flake epoxy floors covers the trade-offs in detail.
Install day
We rolled the moisture-tolerant epoxy primer first thing the next morning. By mid-morning the base coat was going down — pigmented in their chosen warm grey — and while it was still tacky, two of us broadcast the flake by hand across the entire surface. This is the part that’s deceptively simple to watch and surprisingly hard to do well. You’re trying to get a uniform density of flake without dropping clumps or leaving thin patches, working fast enough that the resin doesn’t start to gel before you finish. Forty minutes later the slab looked like a slightly chaotic confetti party, with excess flake everywhere — that’s exactly what you want. The next morning we scraped and vacuumed off the excess, then rolled on two coats of high-build polyaspartic topcoat. By the end of day three the floor was walkable; by the end of day four they could drive on it.
Why marine and coastal jobs are a bit different
Urangan is right on the water, and any garage in this part of Hervey Bay sees more salt exposure than an inland one. We chose a UV-stable polyaspartic topcoat specifically because it doesn’t yellow under sun exposure (regular epoxy topcoats can over time), and because it stands up well to the kind of saltwater that drips off a boat trailer. For boat sheds and marine workshops more generally, we wrote a longer piece on epoxy flooring for boat sheds and fishing workshops that goes deeper into the systems we use for marine-adjacent spaces.
The handover
I love the moment of handing a finished garage back to its owners. The Urangan job was no exception. What had been a tired, stained, dusty grey slab a week earlier was now a deep warm-grey floor with depth and texture, gleaming under the roller door’s afternoon light. The clients were genuinely speechless for a minute. We walked them through the maintenance basics — pH-neutral cleaner, soft mop, no harsh acids or chlorine — and gave them a written care guide. Their fourteen-year-old son immediately asked if he could “test it” by riding his scooter through, which we took as a vote of confidence.
What this kind of job costs in time, not just money
I won’t talk pricing here, but I will talk time. From first site visit to handover was about two and a half weeks, with four days of actual work on site. The clients had to keep the cars and boat out of the garage for a week. That’s the realistic timeline for a properly done epoxy install — not the same-day spray jobs you see advertised on Facebook. The reason ours lasts decades and the spray jobs don’t usually make it through one summer in Hervey Bay is exactly that time difference, spent on prep and curing rather than rushing.
If you’ve got a tired slab in Urangan, Pialba or anywhere on the Bay
Every job teaches us something, and every Hervey Bay home has its own quirks. If your slab is starting to show its age — staining, dust that won’t sweep up, bits of surface flaking off — it’s the right time to talk before the slab itself starts to fail. We’re happy to come and do a proper assessment, with moisture testing and an honest opinion on whether epoxy is the right answer for your space. For the broader picture of what epoxy can do across our region, our complete Hervey Bay epoxy guide is a good starting point.