So, after some pretty hectic times at work, I was finally able to get some more work done on the garage in the weekend right after my birthday.
The main thing hanging over my head at this point is building the garage doors, as well as the door in the small room needing to be ripped out and a new one built. Like I said before, some companies will charge anywhere between 5 and 20 grand for a set of 'carriage house' doors.... which is ludicrous. I'll just build them myself.
So, all of the drywall being done save for three small strips around the small door and large doors, I decided to tackle the big project. It took almost an entire day just to measure, come up with a plan, verify structural integrity, buy the materials, and be ready to get started. Swinging doors are much more difficult than traditional garage doors due to their tendency to sag over time if not built properly.
The key here is to keep weight down while still making them nice and strong, make them able to be very well insulated, resistant to weather, decent looking, etc.
Here is the general shape I came up with. This is the left door, the right would be a mirror image of this.
The main beam for the hinging is a 4x4, the rest of the boards are 2x4's. I'll use 5/16" lag bolts for all of the fasteners (four on the top and bottom of the 4x4, 2 on all the 2x4 joints. Also, the cross beam going from near top to far bottom should alleviate some load from the door wanting to sag. When I find a decent set of hinges, I will use lag bolts to attach each side of the hinge into the 4x4's (the static post the doors hang on is also a 4x4). The outside of the doors will be clad with Texture 1-11 with the more narrow grooves... looks decent, treated for weather, paints well, lightweight. The doors inside will be filled with some foam insulation. The inside of the doors will be clad with some very thin wood sheeting and painted. The bottom of the doors will have rubber 'wiper'-type weatherstrips, the center seal will be similar. The top and sides will have rubber stripping tacked into the door fram so that as the doors are closed they will seal up. The center will use on of those vertical rod locks that will go down into a hole drilled in the concrete.
It took all of another day to frame the doors in and get everything all squared and solid. It was worth it. You could hang a flucking car on these support posts. They are pressure treated 4x4's that are secured to the structure of the building with 1/2" lag bolts that are 10" long. They are perfectly square and level. Also, the last piece of wall had not yet been built because I hadn't decided how the door framing was going to do, so I built that... powder-actuated nail cannon to put the base PT 2x4 into the ground, framed the rest, insulated it, mounted the lightswitch. Here is a view from outside, followed by a few closeups:
(note, this first pic was taken with my new phone, then I emailed it via text message to myself... pretty decent)
Left side (if looking in from outside)
Right side (if looking from outside):
Last bit of wall framed:
One thing you can't see in any of the pictures but that I did do, and was fairly time consuming, was that I installed all of the outlets into the outlet boxes. There are 10 of them... but now I turned all the breakers on so I don't have to run extension cords anymore. Wired up the switch for the spotlights too.
Lastly, I wired up the little spotlights for over the workbench and over the tool chests. These things were a little bitch... cramming all the wires and wire nuts into the junction boxes and then getting them up and into the holes I cut in the drywall and up into the little boxes I framed in. Big pain. It's not readily apparent in these photos, but these little lights are going to provide some great worklight in those two areas.
Workbench lights:
Toolbox lights:
Turned the main lights off, workbench lights:
Now work sucks again, which is why I haven't been on here recently, but hopefully I'll be able to get out there and get some more work done soon.