5-30-06 - The before picture
When we bought the house, the garage wasn't finished. Drywall on the house-facing wall and ceiling, a few receptacles (15 amp) on the house-facing wall, a concrete floor and that was it. Oh wait, forgot about the couple of stolen street signs, oil stains, 3' x 5' x 1' of bricks (that matches the house), old wood, crap, crap, crap. Oh well, the garage is about 750 square feet and provided a really nice starting point.
5-30-06 - Heater
Gotta have a heater... this is, after all, Northern Illinois. Lots of options for heat but I settled on a Sterling SF060 - 60K BTU, natural gas, fan forced. It was $1066 plus shipping. There are a lot of choices and most of them are cheaper but I settled on the Sterling becuase of the separated combustion feature. This heater draws combustion air from the outside, rather than the garage. This has the advantage of not having to replace the combustion air (and more to the point, all the air blown out by a regular exhaust blower on most heaters). It also has a really nice advantage of not blowing yourself up with flamable fumes in the garage.
I bought the unit from www.littlegreenhouse.com. You can find Sterling's brochure on this unit here.
5-30-06 - Hanging drywall
The ceiling and house wall were already drywalled but the other 3 walls had yet to be done. I decided to go with water resistant "green board" for the bottom 2 feet for the walls. The ceiling is 5/8" and the walls are 1/2". It had been a while since I taped drywall and now I remember how it's one of those things that takes practice. I do this infrequently enough that I need to do some relearning between projects :-) I'm not sure I'll ever sand mud again though... once you get used to the wet sponge technique, it's hard to sand because it's such big mess.
5-30-06 - Insulation
The previous owners insulated the walls and ceiling in the house but left the garage for future owners - that is, us. We put 8" of cellulose fiber (blown in) in the ceiling and 4" of fiberglass bats in the wall. Nothiing earth shaking here but one thing I did do - I caulked EVERY crack. It just so happened that I was doing this on a particularly windy day and noticed a BREEZE blowing THROUGH the wall where the 3/4" OSB sheathing seam was in the middle of the wall. At that point, I decided to go caulk crazy and tried to seal everything.
The garage doors had seals but were leaking so I replaced the weather strip.
5-30-06 - Floor paint prep
Researching floor paint made me realize that you really needed a new floor (well, "seasoned" floor with no oil stains)for the best adhesion of floor paint. I had oil stains. So which paint would be best? After investigation I choose Rust-Oleum pro paint. This is a solvent based paint, not water based. The floor had to be clean... I spent quite a bit of time scrubbing oil stains with solvent to try to dry them. I ended up washing the whole floor with TSP, pressure washing it with water, srubbing with TSP again, rinsing, scrubbing again (clear water), rinsing, wet vaccumming, rinsing, rinsing, rinsing... what a lot of work. I spent lots of time on my knees with a scrub brush. As the saying goes, painting is 90% prep. That's true in my experience.