SwissTrax – A perfect garage floor

When I first built my house, I thought that an epoxy-sealed garage floor would be ideal. I had lived in a previous house with a bare concrete/cement garage floor, and it was always dusty, and stained very easily with oil/chemical drips.

Houses in Australia are almost always handed to new owners with a bare concrete/cement floor.

I think my bare concrete floor lasted a whole week (while the driveway concrete dried) before I sealed it with an epoxy garage paint. The kit came with an acid pre-wash which cleaned the concrete, and made it more porous so that the paint could stick better. Once the acid etched the concrete and dried, I mixed the epoxy with the paint, and rolled the paint onto the concrete.

I was impressed with the finished result. It looked crisp, and water beaded on the surface, making it easy to wipe up. Dust and spills cleaned up easily.

But the beading of moisture/liquids ended up being a double-edged sword. Whenever I would drive a car into the garage after it had been raining, lots of water would drip off the car, and pool on the garage floor. The wet epoxy painted finish was extremely slippery!

Another problem with the epoxy painted finish is that hot car tyres began peeling the paint off the concrete.

I needed a better solution.

After watching several YouTube videos of different garage floor solutions (including pebble-mix concrete, silicone coverings and ceramic and plastic tiles) I decided to further research the SwissTrax plastic tile solution.

The advantages are:

• dust and water can fall through the grating, for a clean and non-slip surface
• individual tiles can be removed at any stage, with a 2-side hook and 2-side loop setup
• custom patterns and colour can be incorporated into the design
• incredible floor loading rates allow you to jack up cars on lifts, without deforming the tiles
• up-gradable, removable tiles

I saw little to no disadvantage, other than the reasonably high price (over $2k AUD for my setup).

After getting into contact with the local Australian distributor, I measured my garage, and decided to cover it entirely, wall to wall, including special inclined lip connectors at the garage entry.

I began to utilise the SwissTrax configurator to create a big enough pattern to cover my full garage width and length, while also incorporating a nice pattern into the design.

After settling on the design, and ensuring that it would be big enough to cover the full garage floor area, I ordered the necessary tiles, including 10 extra black tiles, and I borrowed a guillotine tile cutter from the distributor for 2 weeks.

About 20 boxes full of Swisstrax tiles were delivered by a courier, along with a custom aluminium box mounted guillotine.

The next step was to start assembling as per my original design. I had the laptop showing me design the whole time. Each tile snaps into the other with a ‘click’.

The final step was to measure and slice the outer and rear sides of the garage tiles. I wanted to achieve a symmetrical design, and that involved cutting about 10cm from each side.

The end result is, in my humble opinion, awesome.

I would strongly suggest a SwissTrax floor for any garage, mancave or display area.