New coating in the shop floor

I've been working on this for way too long, and I'm just glad it's done. Had to share.

Here, the sawcuts were filled with play sand and an epoxy resin, and the entire floor was ground with a diamond grinder to achieve the proper surface profile for the coating to adhere to.

Different angle with more natural light

First was 2 coats of epoxy primer

Followed by 2 coats of single stage, tinted polyurea

After the color coat, came 3 coats of clear polyurea. I took a picture, but it looks the same as the pics above, just has a bit more thickness and protection now.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it. It's definitely not a professional result if you look at it closely, but that's mostly due to my lack of experience with a concrete grinder. Overall it's good enough and really helps brighten the place up.

If you hose the floor down with soapy water, I bet you do some wicked donuts with a gokart in there.

Looks sweet!

Floor looks great! I hope you don’t mind but I need to ask if you are going to insulate the walls or is that firestone board insulation? I ask because I also have a pole building and I’m thinking ahead. My structure is somewhat similar. Also, is your electric  romex? Tough to see in the pic.

rustybugkiller said:

Floor looks great! I hope you don’t mind but I need to ask if you are going to insulate the walls or is that firestone board insulation? I ask because I also have a pole building and I’m thinking ahead. My structure is somewhat similar. Also, is your electric  romex? Tough to see in the pic.

 

The Firestone stuff is 1.5" thick, foil-faced polyiso foam insulation that I got on Craigslist for 2/3 the cost at the box stores. They're the perfect thickness to fit snugly between my poles and the metal, and they don't intrude into the building footprint. Somewhere around R9 in the walls right now, but they really reduced air movement and drafts so it feels much nicer than before. I will frame walls and insulate more, but the ceiling is a higher priority at the moment as it's basically uninsulated. Hopefully will end up around R45 in the ceiling and R26 or so in the walls. That way if I want to add a mini split down the road it won't struggle too much.

The wiring is standard romex for the switches, lights, and receptacles. 12-2 I believe. But I've got a couple of 240V boxes run as well and that's much heavier gauge obviously.

Thanks! I was considering conduit but after running some 240 in conduit, I thinking romex for 120. So much easier. Did you glue the insulation boards to the metal? I’d be curious to see how you insulate the ceiling. Mine is something like 15’ at the peak which makes impossible to heat. I need to drop it to wall height.

I guess maybe I could start a build thread for the building, but my pictures up to this point have been pretty scarce. I can try and get something more specific if it would be helpful though.

The rigid foam insulation is just wedged between the poles and the backside of the metal (there's a layer of Tyvek under my metal, but that just confuses the image). The sheets are 8 ft long and my poles are 8ft centers, so after ripping the sheets lengthwise to fit between my girts, I'd make a vertical cut so that I could slide the foam in behind the poles. If you look closely at the pics you can see where I taped some of the seams to prevent the boards from falling back into the building. Eventually, the walls will be framed with 2x6s, and that will hold the foam in place more securely.

For my ceiling, the plan is to:

1) Frame the walls on the eave sides of the building so that the header for the walls fits in between the 2x10s that sandwich my poles. That will create an enclosed area at the top of my walls between the 2x10s, that will be filled with cellulose when the rest of the ceiling is insulated.

2) Hang a plastic vapor barrier on the underside of the bottom chord of the trusses

3) Hang white steel "liner panel" on the underside of the vapor barrier

4) blow in cellulose to the desired depth

5) avoid shivering this winter

Hoping to get that done before this winter, but it's all budget dependent right now.

Thanks for the insight. I’ve got to get to work on mine.