Some weeks of the year we get the calls and we know exactly what’s coming. The first really hot stretch hits, garages turn into ovens, owners spend a weekend looking at their stained, dusty concrete and realising they’re going to be living with it for the rest of summer if they don’t do something. We had one of those weeks recently and ended up with a back-to-back run of residential garage jobs across the Bay. The one I want to walk through today was a double garage in Torquay — a tidy renovation house just back from Torquay Beach — and it was the kind of job that reminded me why the prep matters and why our climate adds an extra layer to every install.
The Torquay brief
The clients had done a major renovation of their Torquay home about eighteen months back — opened up the back, added a new alfresco, upgraded the kitchen — but had run out of energy and budget before they got to the garage. The space was a double-bay attached garage with internal access through to the laundry, an original slab probably from when the house was built in the late 1990s, and the usual collection of marks from years of being a garage: oil drips in both parking spots, tyre marks across the entry, dust that settled on every surface despite their best efforts to sweep, and a section near the laundry door where a slow leak from the washing machine had clearly been a problem at some point. They wanted a finish that would look the part with the new house, hide the inevitable scuffs, and stand up to two cars, two bikes, and a paddleboard rack.
The site walk and the moisture question
Day one is always assessment. We moisture-tested the slab in four locations using a calcium chloride test and the digital meter. Three readings were in the comfortable range; the fourth, in the corner near the old washing machine leak, came back higher than I wanted to see. That single high reading would have failed the install if we’d just ignored it and laid the same primer across the whole slab. Instead we planned to use a moisture-tolerant epoxy primer specifically formulated for that situation, and to spend extra time on grinding and treatment in that one corner. Coastal Hervey Bay slabs vary enormously block-to-block depending on what’s underneath them and whether the home has had any historical drainage issues. We never skip the moisture test, even on slabs that look textbook on the surface.
The diamond grind
The whole slab went through a CSP3 diamond grind. This is the step that separates the long-lasting installs from the ones that delaminate inside a season. Acid etching doesn’t get anywhere near the same mechanical bond, regardless of what YouTube says. The grinder pulled off about 1mm of the surface across the whole slab, exposed fresh concrete, and chased the two hairline cracks we’d found. We then dealt with the oil-stained spots specifically — citrus-based oil eliminator, dwell time, lift, re-grind. The slab looked rough and dusty by the end of day one, which is exactly what you want before a primer goes down.
The flake design
The clients had been agonising over the flake colour for weeks. We brought six physical samples to the second site visit and laid them on the slab in the actual garage lighting. They walked around them in the morning, came back at lunch, and came back again at sunset to see how they read under late afternoon light coming through the open roller door. They ended up choosing a warm cream-and-grey base with a black, white and tan flake blend, which would mask scuffs and tyre marks while reading as warm and deliberate when the cars were in. For more on the colour decision-making process, see our piece on metallic vs flake epoxy floors.
The humidity problem (and how we managed it)
Hervey Bay humidity in summer is genuinely tough on epoxy installs. The polyaspartic topcoats we use have a relatively narrow window where they cure properly — too humid and they don’t react cleanly, too dry and the working time shortens to almost nothing. We checked the forecast obsessively and timed the topcoat for an early-morning window where humidity was sitting around 60% and forecast to stay there for the cure time. We also ran a small dehumidifier in the closed garage overnight before the topcoat, which kept the slab itself dry overnight and bought us a margin of safety. These are the boring details clients rarely think about, but they’re the difference between a finish that looks perfect in three years and one that’s developed cloudy patches.
Install day, by the hour
Day two: moisture-tolerant primer at 7am, pigmented base coat by 11am, flake broadcast by hand into the wet base finishing around 1pm. Day three: scraped and vacuumed the excess flake (around 30% of what’s broadcast comes back off), then rolled two coats of UV-stable polyaspartic topcoat with a four-hour gap between coats. Day four: the floor was walkable by morning, drive-on by afternoon. Day five: the clients moved both cars back in, and the kids were inside testing it with their scooters within an hour. That last detail isn’t something I particularly recommend but it’s been the consistent test of approval across every residential job we’ve done.
The handover
The clients were delighted. The single most common comment we get on handover is some version of “I had no idea it could look like that,” and Torquay was no exception. We walked them through the maintenance basics: pH-neutral cleaner, soft mop, no aggressive chlorine or acidic products, and felt pads under any bench legs to protect the topcoat from drag marks. We left a written care guide and the recommended cleaner, and confirmed a twelve-month check-in visit as part of the install. For broader maintenance principles see our piece on epoxy flooring maintenance.
What I’d say to other Torquay, Scarness and Bay-side homeowners
If you’re in Torquay, Scarness, Eli Waters, Point Vernon or anywhere across the Bay and you’ve been staring at a tired garage slab thinking it’s “just a garage,” I’d push back on that. The slab is the foundation of how the whole space feels to use. A properly done epoxy install transforms a garage from a place where you reluctantly park the car into a usable, almost-living space — and it does so for a fraction of what most people imagine. The trick is to choose an installer who does the prep properly, picks products to suit our climate, and is honest about the timeline. For the broader picture of what epoxy does in our region, see our complete Hervey Bay epoxy guide.
The boat-shed and commercial side of the business
While most of our calls are residential garages, we also do a lot of marine and commercial work across the Bay. If you’re a boat-shed, charter operator or commercial-kitchen owner, the systems and approach are different to a home garage. Our pieces on epoxy for boat sheds and marine workshops and our recent Pialba cafe kitchen job cover the relevant detail. The principles overlap — prep, prep, prep — but the product chemistry and timeline change significantly for commercial work.