Finishing a Garage, Part 1
Posted by Wayne
After a much needed (and much deserved, if you ask me) break, this past weekend I started on a new house project.
I’ve spent the past couple of months deciding on which project I wanted to tackle next. I’ve been wanting to finish off our garage just so I can have a nice place to work on the rest of the house projects. Our garage is gloomy and ugly. Some of the drywall work is the worst I’ve ever seen. The walls of the garage are covered with that “holey” material to hang tools from. There is only one electrical outlet in the garage. There is only a single light bulb in the garage. I temporarily fixed the lighting issue before we even moved into the house by adding some fluorescent lighting, but nothing is hardwired and there are cords running all over above and below the rafters above. With a little effort I can fix all the shortcomings of the garage and have a really nice place to work.
This past Saturday my friend Tito was helping me pick up our old appliances and countertops to load up in a trailer to take to the dump. While I had the trailer (borrowed from my folks) I figured I should swing by Home Depot to get some drywall and start on the project.
Before
The drywall is the best place to start on the project because some of the other things I want to do depend on having the drywall completed, namely the built in work bench that I want to build. There is an 8-foot wide indented space in the garage where I want to put the work bench, but only two of the 3 walls are drywalled (see image above). Rather than kicking off the project by doing all of the garage drywalling at once, I just wanted to drywall the spot that I need to be drywalled and then come back to the rest later.
Hanging drywall is an easy project (it’s the finishing part that’s tricky). After tearing down the old “holey” material wall covering about 8 feet away from the back wall, I was easily able to hang the two sheets of drywall by myself. The only cut I had to make on the first two sheets was about 2″ off the end of each so that the sheets would reach directly to the middle of a 2×4 stud.
‘Holey’ Material’
The top of the wall will require about a 4-6″ strip of drywall, and I haven’t hung that yet as I need to cut a hole in the ceiling above the workspace to see what I’m dealing with. If I’m able to fix the existing bad drywall job it will change how I cut the first piece. I’ll need to figure that out and finish these seams at a minimum before I can start on my built in work bench.
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