Clearing a garage floor after a flood

Water on a concrete floor — from a burst hose, a storm, a defrosting freezer or a wash-down — is a job that goes quickly with the right order of work and badly without it. This is the order.

Step one: find where it is going

Before touching anything, work out where the water can leave. A floor drain, a doorway with a slope, a bulkhead, a gully outside. Everything after this is about moving water towards that point.

Concrete floors are rarely level and almost never level in the direction you want. Pour a small amount of clean water in the middle and watch which way it runs; that is your fall, and fighting it costs far more effort than working with it.

If there is no drain and no doorway, the water is going into a wet vacuum or a bucket, and the squeegee’s job is to concentrate it into one shallow pool where the vacuum can reach it.

Step two: sweep first

This step gets skipped and it should not be. Grit, leaves, sawdust and packaging under a rubber blade do two things: they cut the blade, and they jam under it and lift it off the floor, so water passes underneath.

Push the loose debris to one side with a stiff broom before the squeegee comes out. On a floor with standing water, use the broom to move floating debris to the edges first.

Step three: work in strips, back to front

Start at the far end and work towards the drain or door in overlapping strips, each pass slightly angled so water is pushed sideways into the strip you are heading for as well as forwards.

Three points of technique:

• Push, do not pull. Pulling walks you backwards through water you have already moved and re-wets the floor.
• Overlap by several inches. The edge of each pass leaves a bead.
• Do not try to move too much at once. A blade holds a limited volume in front of it; beyond that the water goes around the ends. Two half-depth passes are quicker than one that escapes.

Step four: the corners and the edges

A wide floor blade cannot get into a corner or along a wall where there is a fillet or a skirting. Switch to a smaller blade for the perimeter, or angle the wide one and work along the wall in short strokes.

Water hiding along the base of a wall is what makes a floor look dry and then damp again an hour later.

Step five: the last thin film

A squeegee cannot remove the final film — the surface tension is stronger than the blade. What removes it is airflow.

Open the doors, put a fan on the floor pointing across the surface rather than down at it, and leave it. On sealed or epoxy concrete this takes under an hour. On bare, porous concrete some of the water has gone into the slab and will take considerably longer, and a fan is still the fastest way to get it back out.

Sealed, epoxy and bare concrete behave differently

Sealed or epoxy floors are the easiest: the water stays on top, the blade moves it all, and the surface dries quickly. Watch the blade for grit, because a scratch in epoxy is visible for good.

Bare concrete absorbs. You will get the standing water off and the slab will stay dark for a day. That is normal and not a failure of the tool.

Painted concrete is the one to be careful with: old floor paint lifts at the edges, and a stiff blade will peel a flake that was already loose.

The tool for this specific job

A wide blade — 24 inches if the floor is open — on a long handle, with rubber rather than foam if there is a real volume of water. Foam saturates almost immediately in a flood and becomes useless.

A rotating head is genuinely useful here, because getting around a car, a workbench and a stack of boxes without changing your stance saves a lot of walking.

Have a smaller blade to hand for the perimeter. Two tools finish this job noticeably faster than one.

Afterwards

Rinse the blade, dry it and hang it up. A blade left in a corner of a wet garage standing on its edge will be curled and useless by the next time you need it — which will, in the nature of these things, be an emergency.

What to buy

Wide floor blades with telescoping and long fixed handles are on the floor and deck squeegees page, with the blade width and handle length in every title. For the perimeter and for bathroom-sized areas, the shorter tools are on the shower and bathroom squeegees page.

Ring the counter if you want a recommendation for a particular floor — the difference between epoxy and broom-finished concrete changes the answer.