NASA NorCal member and HPDE instructor PJ Kiely is a contractor in Santa Cruz, Calif. His primary business, Santa Cruz Brick Paving, builds custom driveways and patios. He was building stunning driveways, patios and entryways to some magnificent homes, but he found the garages fell a bit short by comparison.
“We were building all these driveways to houses that had beautiful bathrooms, beautiful kitchens and everything, and you’d get to the garage and it was kind of crap,” Kiely said. “We just sat down and thought about what we could do with people’s garages.”
So he started another company Vroom Room, which customizes garages. Vroom Room does everything from custom cabinets, to drywall, custom lighting and electrical system to audio visual systems, flooring and service lifts.
Vroom Room is an authorized RaceDeck installer. Kiely prefers RaceDeck over epoxy coatings for a couple of reasons. Epoxy floor coatings take days to complete and use toxic chemicals. He doesn’t recommend epoxy for older homes because moisture can rise up through the concrete and cause the it to bubble, even if you did all the prep work right. Conversely, you can have a new RaceDeck garage floor in four to five hours and there are no toxic chemicals involved.
“It’s great. You can’t create another floor that looks that good for the price,” he said, adding that RaceDeck has 10 different styles and 14 standard colors. “That’s why we do it.”
Kiely offers a word of caution if you’re building a new garage: if you include service lifts in the blueprints, building codes could require you to spend upward of $10,000 on additional concrete work. Draw your blueprints accordingly.
Once you get the floor down, the space is limited only by your imagination and budget. Kiely has done installations with vintage refrigerators, vintage gas pumps converted to refrigerators, Dannmar lifts, custom Baldhead cabinetry and high-end multimedia systems.
“It’s the biggest room in the house, normally, and for 10 or 15 grand you can do a really, really nice remodel on it,” he said. “It can be what you want it to be. It just costs money.”
Resources
Vroom Room
RaceDeck Garage Floors
Baldhead Cabinets
Dannmar Lifts
