Finally got fed up with working on my RX7 next to weed-eaters, bicycles, coolers, grandkid’s toys, etc. Also, it’s too cold in the winter to work in the garage and in the summer, flying bugs swarming around the work light make it imposable to do anything. The house my wife and I bought 10 years ago was owned by a car collector and besides the attached 2 car garage; it came with a detached 4 car garage with a small office. I’ve used the air-conditioned office to build the engine and as a quasi-paint booth, but I always wanted a space large enough for the whole car. This fall I decided to close off one bay in the detached garage and make it my shop. This would give me a space about 14 x 25 feet that would be easy to heat and cool and I could keep all my tools locked up in. I replaced the garage door (it had gotten backed into by a step-son anyway) with an R13 insulated unit. I framed up the wall and put in two fiberglass entry doors with dead bolts (one to outside and one to the other part of the garage). Insulated the walls with R13 and the ceiling with R30. This space will be better insulated than my house!
I bought the Harbor Freight drywall lift to do the ceiling. This thing is worth every penny. I got the whole ceiling done without having to beg friends to hold drywall over their head while I put in the screws. You just place a sheet on the lift, flip it up so it’s horizontal, and then crank it up to the ceiling. It was easy to get the drywall exactly in position.
I put in an 18,000 BTU window unit that both heats and cools. This is larger than the space needed, but I wanted to be able to leave it off most of the time, then quickly heat / cool the space when I was ready to work. Three of the walls in the space had CDX plywood on them, so I just taped and floated the plywood along with the drywall. Shot orange peel texture on everything and rolled on two coats of exterior egg shell off white paint.
I scrubbed the floor multiple times. First with Super Clean, then TSP and bleach, then with the concrete etch that comes with the Rust-Oleum garage epoxy. I mopped it over and over with a large commercial mop until the mop bucket water stayed clear after rinsing. Let it dry for three days then put the tan Rust-Oleum epoxy on it. This is the water based stuff, but I planned on putting the clear over it, and it’s a solvent base. The first coat of tan had a few splotchy areas and some lint in it left over from the mop, so I lightly sanded it and put on another coat of tan.
I decided that, although it would be easy to find a dropped screw on the solid color floor, any scratch or mark on it would stand out and drive my OCD crazy. Rust-Oleum makes a dye additive to mix with the clear. It’s made to put over bare concrete, but thought I would try it over the tan. It’s sold at only some Home Depot stores and they can’t ship it (some hazardous material crap or something), so I had to drive to a store in Houston to buy it. You know I’m obsessed by this point. Put rubber bands around the roller to try to break up the finish so it wouldn’t just look like paint. I also added a bottle of the Shark Bite grip to the clear. I had read that it stays dispersed better in the coating than the abrasive that comes in the kit. It did disperse nicely, but I could have used just half of the bottle and still had plenty of grip.
I really like how it turned out. It left darker areas where I lifted up the roller. I should have changed my rolling technique, but looks ok anyway. I decided to put one more coat of clear on it just to give it more sheen. So now I’ve got 4 coats of epoxy on the floor for about $500.
I put rubber base in, trimmed out the doors and windows, put up an old kitchen cabinet I had saved, brought a small metal desk from work to use as a work bench. There’s a 3.5 hp 60 gal. air compressor in the outer garage and I piped in the compressed air in with PEX pipe. Mini fridge left over from one of the kid’s college days, and an old GM car stereo in the cabinet with some small Bose speakers. The plan is to add a flat screen on the wall when the NASCAR season starts (if I can convince my wife I really need it). The only thing I really messed up on was the lights. I bought five T8 fixtures (8 foot fixtures with 4 bulbs each) plus one under the cabinet over the desk. They put out a ton of light, but the mistake I made was I bought them at the local electric supply because they were a few bucks cheaper than at Home Depot. What I didn’t realize was that the ballasts in them are commercial rated not residential, so they put out a lot of RFI. FM radio reception, even with an outdoor antenna, is limited to just the local stations. AM reception is nonexistent. Turn off the lights and distant stations come in perfectly. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet, but I may end up replacing all the ballasts. I know most people would just listen to Pandora, etc. but I work in radio so I guess I’m just old school.
