Has anyone used those garage-floor "tiles"? There are a number of different brands out there (RaceDeck, MotoFloor, Gladiator, etc) but they all seem to be some form of heavyduty plastic 12" squares with a raised pattern on top, that snap together, are supposedly impervious to car fluids, guaranteed for 10 yrs, blah blah blah.

I've seen them advertised as the ideal way to cover a standard cement garage floor, especially one that has been stained, without the mess of putting down an epoxy coating. The guy who services my sprinkler system also installs RaceDeck and he left me a brochure the other day when he was here to move a couple of sprinkler heads. Our garage floor looks pretty awful (car fluid stains, rust stains from last winter's heating system flooding) so I did read through the literature out of curiosity. But the "installed price" sure seems hefty: He quoted $1400 for a 2-car garage which is a little over 500 sq ft!

Supposedly this stuff is fairly easy to DIY, so I have some questions for anyone here who actually has one of these floors:

1. If you DIY'd, how much of a hassle was it? Because everything snaps together, what did you do when you reached a side that wasn't the full 12" square? How did you cut any pieces that needed to be trimmed down? Easy or difficult to cut?

2. Does the surface feel weird to walk or drive onto?

3. Does it really not absorb ANY stains?

4. Do the tiles crack easily? How easy is it, really, to pop out and replace a damaged one? (they say replacing a driveway paver is "easy", but that is an outright lie!)

5. These tiles advertise that "fluids can simply be mopped up with a paper towel" because they don't soak in. That makes me wonder what happens to water that is brought into the garage on tires in rainy weather, and even more so in winter when there will be large sections of snow melting off cars after they're parked in the garage. Garage floors are pitched (somewhat) but not so much that the water quickly rolls away. IMHO more of it soaks into a concrete floor than makes its way out underneath the garage door. So what happens to all that water if the garage has one of these floors? Does it just sit on top of the floor surface indefinitely? Or does it slowly drain through the seams and then eventually down through the porous concrete underneath?

There's no way I'd want to mop up gallons of melted snow with paper towels, that's for sure. So what happens to it all?

The "Dynotile" brand says they're the only one with an "overlock" method of connecting together, which "doesn't allow water to seep through the seams". So does that mean all the other brands do allow the water to move fairly freely through the seams? IMHO that (drainage through the seams) would be a plus: No standing water in the garage.

Just FMI, if you had your garage floor installed, about how much did it cost? $1400 sure sounds overpriced for a job this guy said would take "only about 3 or 4 hours" and have no prep work other than sweeping the existing floor clean and fitting together the tiles.

Any other opinions on this stuff would be appreciated!