1. Garage Floor

First thing I wanted to do was put down floor tiles. But before that could happen, things needed to get cleaned up. I still had boxes of "stuff" everywhere and nowhere to put it. So, a tool chest got bought.

After everything got cleaned out, I patched up some pitted concrete. I figured if I'm never seeing this concrete again, I want to be sure it's at 100% and not deteriorating beneath the tiles. Then, I called my buddy over (lured with the promise of friendship and food) to lay down some floor tiles. I used Racedeck Diamond tiles, and I'm happy with them. Significantly more comfortable to work on, and looks pretty spiffy!

It took the two of us, who had never seen a floor tile before, about 3 hours to lay out 20' x 20' of these tiles and edge ramps. I watched the installation video once. After a dozen tiles or so, we came up with a good technique. Rough in the corner where it touches two tiles, rough in the 2 outer-most corners, then stomp away. The garage was an exact number of tiles across (I think 20 tiles wide), so only the back edge needed to be cut. Top-side face-down on a table saw, cutting 4 tiles in a row in a pass using the fence, and a quick sanding of the cut edge led to very good results with minimal work.