Buninyong is one of those Central Highlands suburbs that’s quietly becoming a hotspot for the kind of home renovation we get called into. Heritage-feel weatherboards on big blocks, owners doing their own woodworking or restoration projects, garages that have to double as workshops, and the perennial Ballarat-region temperature swings making winter conditions genuinely tough on any surface that isn’t built for them. We finished a job in Buninyong a couple of weeks back that was a great example of a residential install where the garage really is a working space, not just car storage. Here’s how it came together — and a few lessons that I think translate well to similar homes across the region.
The Buninyong brief
The clients had bought their Buninyong property about five years ago — a beautifully kept late-1880s timber home on a generous block with a separate freestanding double garage built sometime in the early 2000s. The owner is a serious woodworker who’d spent the previous winter genuinely fed up with the dust that rose off the porous concrete every time he ran the thicknesser, and his partner was tired of the constant grey film on every horizontal surface in the kitchen, which was attached to the garage by a covered walkway. They wanted a heavy-duty floor that could take dropped tools, occasional spilled finishes and the regular movement of a small mobile workbench, and they wanted it to look the part of a genuine working studio rather than a paint-over patch job.
The slab condition
The slab was about 20 years old, in pretty good structural condition, but showed the usual signs of two decades of working life. A few hairline cracks running diagonally from the front roller door, two oil stains where the previous owners had parked a leaky old motorbike, a patchy area near the side door where someone had clearly attempted a DIY paint job at some point that had partly peeled off, and the inevitable surface deterioration where the slab edge meets the gravel driveway. Moisture testing came back within spec in three locations — Buninyong properties on the rural side of town generally don’t have the clay-reactivity issues you can hit in Lake Wendouree or the older parts of Ballarat East.
Why DIY paint always has to come off first
One of the first questions clients ask when they’ve already attempted a DIY garage paint is whether we can just go over it. The answer is almost always no, and Buninyong was a textbook example. The previous attempt had been a hardware-store one-part epoxy paint laid over an unprepared slab. It had bonded poorly, was already peeling in patches, and would have undermined any real epoxy system we laid over the top. We had to grind it all off as part of the prep. This is the same story we see across most of Ballarat — the DIY garage paint is rarely the right product, and almost never installed with the prep that an actual epoxy needs. For more on why prep matters so much, see our piece on Ballarat garage floor preparation.
The cold-climate scheduling
We always plan Ballarat-region installs around weather windows where slab temperature stays within the product spec for proper cure. Buninyong sits at around 760 metres elevation, even higher than central Ballarat, and winter overnights routinely drop below freezing. This job was scheduled for a shoulder-season week where slab temperature was holding above 8°C through the cure window. We used a cold-tolerant primer system and ran a small portable heater in the closed garage overnight before the topcoat to make sure the slab didn’t drop overnight. These are the boring scheduling details that most clients never notice — but they’re the difference between a floor that lasts and one that starts to lift at the edges within a year. For more on this, our piece on epoxy flooring in Ballarat’s cold climate walks through the principles.
The flake and finish decision
The clients had originally been leaning toward a darker, more workshop-feeling flake blend. We pushed back gently. A working garage in Ballarat needs the floor to brighten the space rather than darken it — winter light through a single side window is limited, and a dark floor makes the whole space feel cave-like and cold by mid-afternoon. We talked through it with physical A4 samples in the actual garage at three different times of day, and they ended up choosing a warm medium-grey base with a black, cream and silver-grey flake blend. The result reflects light around the space and reads as a deliberate working studio rather than a man-cave. For more on this kind of decision, see our piece on choosing colours and finishes for your Ballarat epoxy floor.
The install itself
Day one was the demolition crew dealing with the DIY paint and the full diamond grind. Day two: primer in the morning, base coat by lunch, flake broadcast by mid-afternoon. Day three: scrape and vacuum, two coats of polyaspartic topcoat with a four-hour gap. Day four: the floor was walkable by morning, drive-on by late afternoon. The owner moved his thicknesser and bench back in the next morning and was making sawdust again by lunch — but this time the sawdust stays on the floor, vacuums up cleanly, and doesn’t migrate into the rest of the house.
What the woodworker noticed first
I always find it interesting what clients comment on first when they see the finished install. For this owner it wasn’t the colour or the finish — it was the lighting. A sealed garage floor reflects rather than absorbs the light from the existing fluorescent fittings overhead. He told me a week later that he’d actually been able to switch off one of the two fittings and still had more usable light at the workbench than before. The second comment, predictably, was about the dust — gone. The third comment was that the cold concrete that used to suck warmth out of his feet in winter now sits at a more bearable temperature, because the epoxy gives a small thermal break from the slab.
What this means for other Buninyong, Mount Clear and Lake Wendouree owners
If you’re in Buninyong, Mount Clear, Lake Wendouree, Ballarat East or anywhere across the Central Highlands and you’ve been thinking about your garage, the conversation worth having is sooner rather than later — partly because spring and autumn are our best install windows and they fill up fast, partly because the longer a tired slab sits unaddressed the more contamination it picks up. We always do a proper on-site assessment with moisture testing before quoting, and we’re upfront about whether epoxy is the right answer for your slab or whether something else would serve you better. For the broader commercial picture across Ballarat, see our pieces on commercial epoxy in Ballarat and our recent workshop install in Wendouree.
A note on the small details
Looking back at the Buninyong job, the things that made it work were almost entirely the small decisions — the dust extraction during grinding so the rest of the property stayed clean, the timing of the topcoat to a humidity window, the physical A4 samples in the actual garage, the felt pads we recommended for under the workbench, the careful labelling of which control joints were saw-cut and which were expansion joints. None of those individually are dramatic, but they’re what separates a working studio from a paint job. The clients are about to send us a referral for a neighbour, which is the best feedback we get in this business.