Garage Tiles for Detailing — Are They Worth It?

Garage tiles for detailing look cool, but are they the best option for a detailing garage floor? Dr. Beasley’s Director of Success Chris Racana takes a look at the pros and cons based on our own experience using garage tiles in our detailing “Clean Room” for the past year. Watch the video below, or read the transcript we’ve also included!

Last Updated March 9, 2022

Welcome to Simon’s Detail, everybody, I am Chris Racana, Director of Success with Dr. Beasley’s, and today we are here to talk floors and flooring.

So like many details shops, Simon’s Detail was opened in a building that was repurposed. It was an old auto shop, so we had to adapt that former use to our current use as Simon’s Detail. So first thing we saw in the building were these concrete floors. Obviously, these present many issues when you’re talking detailing.

Number one, it’s an aesthetic issue. Concrete, bare concrete floors, especially these where there’s dips and cracks and all that… not the best look, especially when you’re trying to present yourself as a very detail oriented business.

The other thing, you have a safety issue here, you can slip, you can trip. And then there’s also the general comfort of your work area. If you’re getting down in some wheels and doing some wheels, do you want to have to always be battling the fact that you’re soaking wet from the knees down?

So what we found was floor tiles. Now, floor tiles did solve a lot of these problems, but not all the problems, and actually presented some new problems that were not anticipated. So let’s go over to where we do have floor tiles currently installed and we can talk a little further about this.

So one of the things you’re going to see with the floor tiles is it does get you up out of the water.
You can see a giant pool of water on the concrete floor I’m standing on right now — if I walk through that, my shoes would be soaking wet. So at least with the tile, it gets us up out of the water, so we’re not standing in the water.

It also is aesthetically much more pleasing to the eye. For customers that are coming into your shop, you’re looking much more put together, much more clean and crisp. Again, this is all confidence building for your customer to come into your shop and see this.

However, we found that it was not the perfect solution. So one of the issues was sometimes you get customers with sports cars that have really sticky tires — and you guys out there that got Comp-2’s on your car, I’m talking to you — and those really super sticky tires, when they turn and they’re twisting, and we’re trying to maneuver cars around in tight spaces, sometimes that caused some buckling and pulling up of those tiles. Although other times it’s just big, gnarly off-road trucks that have a ton of weight to them. Under these circumstances, the tiles
didn’t always hold up the greatest.

However, the major issue, though, was drainage. So while we are no longer standing in the water, what we found was that the floor tiles were actually trapping moisture — but not only moisture, also dirt and just general nastiness. I mean, if you’ve ever been through a Chicago winter or if you’re in the north, you know all that stuff that you get all over your car. Think about it. It’s just going down into these tiles and it’s just sitting there. So you actually have to pull up your tiles every few months to clean and get all that garbage out. So there is maintenance there to consider if you do go the floor tile route.

So this proved for us again not to be the ideal solution for our clean room. Now in this particular lane, in our detail overflow lane, the floor tiles are actually a very good solution for us, because traffic moves straight in and moves straight out. And again, we don’t see a great deal of washing going over here. This is an overflow detail bay, so there’s not a lot of contaminants being sloughed off here to be trapped underneath this tile.

All right. So if you are considering going down the floor tile route, some things you should consider:

First of all, not all tiles are made equal. There are a variety of brands out there and a variety of costs. Naturally, you usually get what you pay for. So do consider that.

Some other things, though, that you should consider is the install of a floor tile is very fast. I mean, we’re not having to do a great deal of prep work before we install our floor tile. However, the actual install itself, you have to be very detail oriented. As you see, you’ve got to be able to trim around walls and doors and in turns and curves. So again, that is something you have to be able to willing to put in a little bit of elbow grease as far as that is concerned.

Another thing you have to be willing to do if you do go down the floor tile path is, you know, that maintenance every few months or maybe once a year, maybe twice a year depending on where you are and how you’re using it.

So again, you’re going to have to consider the fact that, hey, we’re going to have to pull all this up. Clean it all and put it all back down. So there is a time and cost associated with that as well.