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Michael Stewart 0:01
Welcome to another episode of the TKO flooring Podcast. I’m Mike Stewart, your host. And here we are today with Zack Ullman, flooring expert from TKO. And one of the questions is that we get a lot is that we love flake flooring. But why is it so expensive, so explain that to us that
Zach Allman 0:20
the main reason that plank floors have actually jumped in price here in the last year and a half, two years or so is the price on epoxy and the bare materials that it takes to actually do these floors has jumped by around 200%. And I’d say about a year and a half, two years now. So that adds, you know, ultimately to the ink costs. But the main thing that you pay for in the flake versus a solid or an acetone died floor is the process gets an extra day a little bit of extra labor, and they’re longer days. So when you do a flake floor you want to come in you do the grinding and the prep process, vacuum everything really nice and clean, and then you do your patch work. After your patch work, you want to sand that down, do a primer coat that’s got a solid color epoxy. And then the next day you actually have to come back, sand that coat and then patch once more. So you get all the little holes, divots, cracks, joints, things that’ll show up in that finished product. And once you finish with that you do a second body coat with a solid color epoxy. So you’ve already got two coats of epoxy then and then you want to broadcast your Torgan all chips which gives you that flake look into that body coat. The box is a flake themselves, you know they’ve jumped in price recently, the biggest part is getting him shipped over being that they’re 40 pound boxes, they’re not easy to get in. And then after you do that you’ve got an extra day of labor on the third day. So you come in clean everything up, you want to sweep up the excess flake, you want to scrape off any spots that seem to have just clumped up on that body coat. And then you clean it up. And then that’s where you get the poly Aspartic topcoat, which is one of the most amazing products that we offer, because it’s got UV stable protection, and it’s water protective, it’s, it’s going to keep your garage floor from cracking and ruining again and keep you having that nice, beautiful flake floor. The hardest part about this topcoat is you don’t want to do it too thin, because then you ultimately risk your floor failing later on down the line. You also don’t want to do it too thick, because one of the added advantages to these flake floors is you get a lot of texture in it. So if you do it on a garage, or a front porch, or even in a restaurant dining room, you don’t run the risk of it getting wet and people slipping, falling and ultimately wanting to sue you, which no one wants to do. And the other benefit of these flight floors is you know, you get the flake itself. So you have a lot of different colors working together, you don’t necessarily have one solid color throughout. So it’s not boring. It’s kind of, you know, neat looking, if you if you will. And that’s kind of the main reason that they’re more expensive. Like I said, it’s epoxy price, the extra labor, but they are worth it. Because you do like I said, get the texture, you get that pretty look and you get something that’s ultimately going to be more durable than most floors out there because you have three coats, including a quote, an extra coating of the flakes themselves. So you get durability, you get longevity and you get the textured feel in there without having to pay for an aluminum oxide broadcast or anything on top.
Michael Stewart 3:33
Well, thank you for that explanation. You know, folks consider a flake flooring as a great option. They look beautiful. Everybody’s satisfied with them, get them and you know, you got to remember that you sometimes you have to invest a little more to get something that’s a higher quality. And that’s what we’re talking about here. So, we do this podcast as a public service to help people understand the flooring industry and answer the questions so that it’s available when you’re trying to make a decision. Because doing a concrete floor is a great decision whether you’re a business or a residence. You can get to our podcast on all the popular podcast systems like apple. We’re in Amazon. We’re in Google and we’re in Spotify. And until next time, this is Mike Stewart for the TKO podcast
Transcribed by https://otter.ai