Fox T-Bird/Cougar Forums

Just thought I'd post up some progress pics of my late summer project. It's not a car, but it's something that will make future project cars possible. When I sold my house in spring I bought a much nicer house that was much closer to work, but I gave up one thing: The new house had no garage. Not anymore...

First the groundwork (there are 5 loads of surge rock in there to level that pad, and several loads of fill had to be removed in the right rear corner):


Next the slab:

The materials (some assembly required):

Standing the walls:

More standing walls:

Making the roof:

Shingles (ridge cap not on yet)

Windows & Doors

Housewrap

Garage doors trimmed

And finally, siding started. This is how the garage sits as of tonight:



My brother and his employee/friend/ex-brother-in-law have been a great help for framing, but I've been doing everything else myself (it is them who are in the wall-standing pics). The progress has been slow because it's been raining every God-ed weekend since early September, but it's getting there...

Looks great, must be on a bit of land there?

how big is the garage?

The land is an acre. The garage is 24'X24, with 12' walls (to allow future installation of a hoist). I wanted to go bigger but anything over 600 square feet requires an "engineered" slab, which would have doubled the cost of the already very expensive ($4000) slab... In fact the whole project has gone way over budget. I was hoping to get it done for under $12k and am already $17k deep into it. The slab and groundwork alone totaled $6500...

Looks great, I built a 30x40 shop.

Yeah, anything smaller will just make you wish you'd done it larger imo. 36x24 is the very bare minimum I'd like, preferably 36x28 or larger. One day I'll be able to have something larger than 20x20 with about 14x19 usable for a vehicle and actual tool storage.....

I've just purchased a new place and am looking at new garage options.
can't wait :D

This looks great, soon you will have your oil burner stove in there you built a while back.

I happy for you man, cant wait to see more progress pics especially of the work bench.
Mine is 24x24 also.

full width work bench across the rear of the garage with diagonal supports , meaning they go from the floor wall up at a 45deg angle up to the bottom of the bench.
I have shelving on each side of the garage as well.
i deleted one car stall so the left door does not open, but inside along this garage door there is another work bench.

good work man,, mine values at 24K for insurance purposes, and fankly, that pad you have there is not very expensive, its fairly well on target when you blend in a good avg labor rate.

i have a suggestion for you now so you dont mess up, than me later throughout the rest of your life :)
Run a perimeter 2'' conduit all the way around the shop up high with stragegically located 6x6 jBox's. If i had it to do over, i would not have surface mounted outlets or wiring, it would all be exposed conduits with pull strings in each.

just a thought,, to get you thinking about future electrical growth and especially changes.
the sub panel you have in the garage would also not be surface mounted but exposed so its not inside the walls.

I'm installing a 100 amp sub panel in the garage, and there will be outlets and lights galore, including two 220v welder outlets, one at the front and one at the rear. I've worked in enough shops to know that the lights will be in their own breaker, then a separate breaker for every outlet in the garage. Nothing worse than tripping a breaker in the middle of a weld. Well, there is one thing worse: tripping the breaker and ending up in the dark because the lights are on the same circuit.

I'll also be running a second conduit under ground alongside the power feed from the house. This second conduit will include several phone cables (for phone and alarm), a CAT-5 for Internet, and a co-ax for cable TV plus one for closed-circuit video. The garage will be wired for speakers as well, since I love it loud while working...

Electrical work is what I do best, and this garage will reflect that :D

That sounds awesome I wish I had ethernet and cable TV and all them goodies in my garage

That's going to be nice, you'll really enjoy it when the lift is in place...

Looks like a nice toy-box!

When I built my 30x40 I used a lighting buttstuffysis program to plan the placement of my lights. I ended up turning the fixtures 90 degrees from what I originally thought I would do after using the program. It allowed me to optimize the spacing and placement from the walls to give a uniform lighting using reflection patterns from the walls and ceiling. It shows all the shadows and allows you to take advantage of windows in your design.

 For instance,  I have a window, so I have a separate switched set of lights I can leave off in the daytime when the sun is out. I also have the lights above the overhead doors on a discrete circuit so when the doors are open I leave the front row of lights off since they are blocked by the raised doors. That all saves a bit of electricity over time.

I googled and came up with this as a freeware example of what I'm talking about http://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.com/software-tutorial-superset/lighting-buttstuffysis , but I don't remember what program I used back then.

Another thought:

I bought the cheap $8.00 fixtures with electronic ballasts from Home Depot and a case of flouro T-28 lights,  then bought industrial ballasts off Ebay (in bulk) to put in when the cheapie ballasts died out over the next 2 years. I replaced a couple in the first year, then all the rest over the next 4 years as they went out 1 at a time.

Those fixtures are wired with household plugs on them, so I took them apart and drilled bigger holes in the mountings to use with proper Romex connections.  Doing it this way saved over 1/2 the cost of buying industrial fixtures with good ballasts at $40-50 a copy.

 
I like the electronic ballasts because they are silent when running (I have over 20 fixtures and the hum you get from conventional ballasts is annoying to me), and they are instant on. They are energy efficient as well. The cheap ballasts are tiny and have poor quality components inside. The good industrial ones are very robust. I have never had one fail to date.

Good luck with the rest of the build!

Couple other thoughts.....

I am very happy that I insulated well and used insulated doors. I have oil heat (supplemented with discarded jet fuel from work :) ) and I can leave the heat on all year at 55 degrees. The furnace only runs a few minutes once every hour or so in the coldest weather. If I bump to 65 it runs twice as long! I have a programmable thermostat that I'd HIGHLY recommend. The best feature I would say you must have is that it automatically resets to 55 if I forget to turn it down when I go in the house at night. I don't mind having to reset it back up every couple hours if I'm working late, since what it saves me is huge in comparison to the inconvenience.

Also think about running a water line while the trencher is there. I really like having water back here so I can wash cars and clean up before I get to the house. Not to mention making coffee!

:cheers:

I want radiant heat when I grow up. Something about the thought of lying on a warm floor while crawling under a plow truck on a cold snowy night. But I guess with a lift it will keep my tootsies warm?

I thought about running a water line but decided against it, because running water would have required drainage, which would have been expensive (local code forbids a drain of any sort in a garage floor without an oil/water separation system). That being said, when I build the addition (oh yes, this building is not even finished yet and an addition is already planned) I'm going to mount a 45 gallon plastic drum to the outside rear wall that will be filled by the rain gutters. This water will be gravity fed into a laundry style set-tub and will be used for washing hands, etc. In winter I'll just pull a plug on the barrel and allow the it to drain, so I won't have to worry about winterization.

As for insulation: The doors are R12, the walls will be R20, and the attic will be R40. My old garage was uninsulated, so I know how important insulation is. Heat will come from a waste engine oil stove, as was the previous garage. Version 2.0 of this stove will be a big improvement over the last one. I also know the value of god quality ballasts. The cheap ones I had in my old garage often failed to light or were very noisy when cold. For now, though, I'll simply install basic sockets with CFL bulbs until fundage regenerates a bit...

Looking great :)

I just had a 22'x22' garage built in the spring. It looked so big inside when it was done. Once I added two cars, a work bench, shelves, and garden tools/lawn mower/snow blower it wasn't so big inside anymore :hick:. Being on an acre you have the room to expand when 24'x24' isn't big enough. I live in the city with rules about property lines and such. I envy you ;).

A little more progress this weekend. Had the gravel dropped off yesterday morning, and spent most of yesterday moving it around (I'd booked yesterday off, indeed every Friday between now and Dec 1, for deer season). A lot of it was moved with the 4 wheeler plow, but a good deal of it was moved the old fashioned way: Me, a shovel, and a rake. I used muscles yesterday I forgot I had. And those muscles have been reminding me constantly ever since.

No rest for the wicked though. Gotta take advantage of this nice weather - it was into the mid 60's today and nice and sunny. I was wearing a T-shirt while working outside in late October, something that doesn't happen often in eastern Canada. Got the siding on the front finished, and did the two sides up as far as I could go before having to finish the fascia and soffit on the gable ends.  Got the back side sided up as far as I could go without having to go up a ladder, as it was getting quite dark at this point.

This is how it looks from the road now:

looks great, a hoist will be awesome.

now you need a regular garage attached to the house... :D

do many people go steel garages over there?

all the garage builds i've seen in the US seem to be woodframe.

over here most people go a full steel shed kit, i think because its significantly cheaper.
i'm assuming theres not much price difference over there?

Can't speak for USA, but here in Nova Scotia, Canada some people here use steel, but mainly in rural areas or commercial zones. In the 'burbs and cities local bylaws usually say the garage has to match the house architecturally- I know it does in my neighbourhood, anyway. That's why I went with the "slate" coloured vinyl siding and grey asphalt shingles.

Also, I don't know what building materials cost over there in Australia, but here in eastern Canada (and probably the northeastern USA) wood is relatively cheap. The framing and sheathing on this garage was actually one of the cheapest parts - I paid $600 for all the OSB, $600 for all the 2X12's, and $900 for the roof trusses. Compare that to the $4000 for the concrete pad, $1700 for siding materials, $1200 for shingles, and about $1200 in windows & doors... This is why this project ended up costing so much more than what I had planned on. The wood was the cheap part - it's everything else that costs so frickin' much...

most people like their garage to match their house, especially if they can see it...
thats why the front of mine has real wood siding..... my wife said "it needed to match out house"

also, a lot of housing developments will not allow you to erect large steel buildings on residential property.....
in fact there are a lot of upscale places I know where you aren't allowed to have an above ground pool.

it really depends on where you live I guess

fair enough, i figured there would be some local laws or something dictating what can/can't be done.

Its actually *more* difficult to erect a wood one here due to all the plans etc needing to be submitted to council to get a building permit, steel sheds are a lot easier to get through.

matching the house is obviously a big bonus if you can do it that way.

Looks good!!

Haven't updated in a while...

The garage is now functional. It's fully wired and partially insulated (the back wall and attic, the rest will be insulated gradually, by buying a bag of insulation and a few sheets of drywall each payday). I've set up an oil stove for heat. It's kind of a continuation of my old waste oil stove, but this one is currently set up to run a 50/50 mixture of furnace oil and waste oil. Right now there's only one tank, so I mix it as I add it (IE I add a gallon of waste engine oil and a gallon of furnace oil to the tank), but eventually I will add a second tank and mix the oils in the lines. One major improvement with this stove: No power is required. My old stove required a fan to blow air into the fire, otherwise it would smoke like hell. This stove has a flower-shaped catalyst that gets really, really hot and a built in draft regulator that feed in the right amount of air. The result: Less fuel is consumed, more heat is provided, and there is no smoke at all.

Once I have two tanks I'll run the waste oil line in a way that it gets heated by the stove. I hope to set it up so that furnace oil is only required to get the stove started and hot, then once it's hot I can switch over to waste oil.

As for the rest of the garage: I wired it with a pair of outlets every six feet, one at normal height and one at 4 feet high. Each pair of outlets is on its own circuit breaker, so tripping breakers shouldn't be an issue. There are 16 overhead lights, switched at 4 per switch. Lighting is on its own circuit, so even if a breaker blows I won't be in the dark. I made provisions for a 220-volt compressor, a ceiling fan over the stove, a 220-volt circuit for a hoist, and a 220-volt outlet for the stick welder that also doubles as a feed in for my generator, so if the power goes out I can run the generator in the garage (with the bay doors open, of course) and backfeed the power into the house (after shutting off the house's main breaker, of course, to prevent backfeeding into the grid). I also ran a cat-5, several 4-wire phone wires (one for phone, the rest to tap into the house security system), and an RG6 for able TV.

 I got to break the garage in by replacing the oil pan in my father's Grand Cherokee. Lucky me... it's got the 4.7, which required having to take the Y-pipe off, which there is absolutely no room to do. Luckily the manifolds have through-bolts instead of studs, so I was able to cut them off with the torch, although it wasn't easy even getting the torch in there to cut them. The reason I mention the Cherokee is that, as you can see by the photos, there is plenty of room to work on and around it, even with the work bench in place...

Photos:
This one shows the siding and roof finished:


This one shows the oil stove and tank:


And this one shows how much room is in front of the Cherokee:

awesome..... when you insulate the rest of the walls.... put about 8" of flashing metal up the wall from the floor behind the drywall, so mice dont make a hole in it and live in the insulation

Will do. I remember you mentioned that before.

For those wondering about the odd sheathing on that back wall, I did it that way for a couple of reasons. First and foremost I had the extra OSB and would rather use it than store it. Second, I figured wooden interior walls would be better for hanging cabinets and tools from. I only had five leftover sheets, so I couldn't go all the way to the ceiling on both sides, so I didn't go all the way up on either side (that fifth sheet can be seen under the Jeep preventing oil from dripping on my as-yet unprinted and un-protected concrete floor). Wooden walls on the top third would serve no practical purpose either, since they would be between 8 and 12 feet high - too high to mount cabinets or hang tools. I didn't put OSB behind the stove for fire reasons, hence my weird T-shaped drywall installation... It won't look so funny once I paint the wood white, though...

Looks very cool, great job!!!

Looks nice and comfortable to work and play in the tv and phone lines are great.

Looks awesome :).