# Garage Build



## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

Moved into our new construction house about six months ago (just enough to lay 6k sq ft of Celebration before it went dormant) on our 17 acres. We had a barn built when we built the house, but did not have the builder build the garage. Mainly because I wanted to do it myself. So, thought I might log some of the progress here.

Build will be a 24x28 detached garage with a bathroom. Though it will be a garage in name, for the forseeable future, it will be used as a school room for the kids (we homeschool), and I'm also planning to put a pool table in it. Because of that, and because I"m a building science nerd, I'll be building it much more like a house than a garage. Basic plan is as follows. For the foundation, will pour 18"x9" footers (done) with horizontal rebar running throughout. Vertical rebar tied in every 4' around that perimeter. On the footer will be a 2' tall stem wall of CMU blocks (partially done). We'll then fill inside the blockwork with a few inches of gravel, lay 2" foam insulation on top of that, a vapor barrier, and then pour the slab to the top edge of the block.

Framing will be relatively conventional, but will have 2" of exterior insulation (type TBD...probably polyiso or Rockwool). I'm going to do some unusual things for the construction of the roof, but I'll go into more detail when I get to that point in a month or two.

Plan is to then install a ductless mini-split HVAC, and will likely also have to add some sort of mechanical ventilation to bring in fresh air. Once the inside is finished out, will probably do an epoxy flooring, but still undecided on that as well.

I'll add some pictures of current progress in a subsequent post later. I'm at work and they don't let us get to Google Photos from here.

Happy to answer any questions about the process including costs, time, etc.


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## San (Jun 21, 2021)

Nice plans. Looking forward to seeing updates.

How are you handling the utilities?


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## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

Going to run electricity from the main panel out to a sub-panel in the garage. For plumbing, we're on a septic. I had them stub out a line to near the garage location that I can tie into.


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## corneliani (Apr 2, 2019)

Love the post!
What's the plan on the ceiling/structure height? Doesn't look like you'll have interior stairs with that footprint. And are using polyiso in lieu of osb, Or in addition to?

Oh, and so share your plans for the garage door. Som many cool options nowadays!


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## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

@corneliani Thought about being all fancy and doing a vaulted ceiling inside, but decided against it for a few reasons. First, wasn't sure we'd actually even like it in the long run. It would put the peak of the ceiling inside at 15' or so, which might just end up feeling a little cavernous, especially if/when it gets turned back into a garage down the road. 2. From a construction standpoint, it just complicates things. Would've forced me to use a load bearing ridge beam, which for the spans we're talking about would've probably forced me to rent a crane for a day to set it. So that was strike two. Third was also ease of construction....vaulted would've probably meant doing an unvented assembly with spray foam, which I really just didn't want to do from a price perspective (in our house our second floor is split down the middle. On the south half are the kids bedrooms, vaulted ceilings, a bunch of closed cell spray foam in the rafter bays for insulation. On the north half, it's a walk-in attic with a steeper roof pitch and all of the HVAC ductwork lives in there. It is also spray foamed in the rafter bays, so the HVAC lives in the conditioned space of the attic).

So we'll just do 9' ceilings, standard drywall finish (well, I'll do drywall a little differently, but that post will be down the road). Will have some sort of pull down ladder into the attic space, though not sure yet how I'm going to airseal and insulate that. Will spray in dense pack cellulose in the attic to get R40 insulation in the attic (at least).

Polyiso will be in addition to OSB. I'll probably use Zip sheathing for the shear wall/osb and then do 2" polyiso on top of the Zip. Walls will be 2x4 (in contrast, our house is 2x6 framing 1" XPS insulation on the exterior, also with Zip sheathing).

Garage door is a good question. We should've picked one out already given the lead times I've heard there are on garage doors right now, but we haven't. Our house is kind of a farmhouse-ish look, so will probably try to stay with something that fits with that theme.


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## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

First step was obviously to layout the building. We debated for a while on where to lay it out. We hae a stoop from our laundry room and could've put the garage close to the house and built a breezeway from garage to house. However, we decided that would kill some of our open views out to the woods on that side of the house and would leave us with no way to create a drive from the driveway back to the barn (another couple hundred feet back from the house/garage area). So, we set the garage about 30 feet off of the house and will have the garage door facing the house (so you'll come up the driveway and take a right hand turn into the garage).

Started out by setting some rough corners with a few tapes, the help of my kids and measured sides and diagonals. At the same time, I also pulled some diagonals off the house to try to square up the garage with the house as best I could. Once I had the corners roughly marked, I set up some batter boards to do the final establishment of corners and to mark them on the batter boards so I could come back and re-establish the corners at any point I needed to (e.g. after excavation). Here you can see the batter boards set up, barn in the background. Instead of actually tying my strings to the nails on the boards, I actually tied the strings to bricks and hung them over. Makes it way easier to make adjustments until you have everything finalized. 


Once I had corners firmly established, I went ahead and laid out my footers. I'll be doing 18"x9.5" footers and then will build a block stem wall on the footers and eventually pour a floating slab inside that block wall. In this second picture you can see the corners (orange string) as well as the footers (pink string). I've gone ahead and spray painted the rough outline of the footers on the ground as a guide for when I start digging.


Then the real fun began. Rented a mini-excavator for the weekend (all-in, including delivery from the rental place to my house for the weekend was ~$500). 


After I'd dug a trench from my house out to the barn (for future electric), I went after the footers for the garage. You can see here my laser level set up on the table in the middle. My goal was to dig to a depth of ~24" at the highest corner. This part would've went way faster with a second person out there working the laser, but I had to get off an on frequently to check depth. Also of note, if you ever do this and are going to pour footings in a trench, dig a wider trench than you think you need. I had a 24" bucket, so I ended up with a trench 24-30" wide. It's been tight to work in that space. 



Next post will cover concrete prep and form work.


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## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

Obviously one of the keys to a solid foundation is to have solid earth under your foundation to prevent settling. So after the footing trenches were done, I rented a jumping jack to compact the trenches. I ran this guy around the trench quite a few times, then put in 2-3" of gravel in the trench and ran the compacter over the gravel as well.


About this point, it got really rainy here. So, I spent a lot of the rest of December and early January with my trench filled with water


Once we got some drier weather, though, I started building forms. This is where having a wider trench would've been helpful. I didn't have enough room to set my form and screw it to the concrete stakes in the trench. So instead I had to screw stakes onto the forms and then set them in place. This was a bit of a pain, but got it done. I used 2x10s for the forms and again used the laser level to refine these to level after I had them all in place.


Once forms were done, it was time to add rebar. I went with 3 pieces of rebar running horizontally in the footer (only 2 required, but a third won't hurt), and then placed vertical rebar tied in to the horizontal rebar every four feet. This rebar will come up in the webbing of the block and help to stiffen the block wall. I used Hercules rebar chairs http://www.herculeschair.com/, which made laying the horizontal rebar pretty easy. Rebar was lapped 2' at each intersection. To hold the vertical rebar in place, I used some scrap 2x4s cut to span the footer and drilled a 3/4" hold in each one. Put the rebar through the hole, then screwed the 2x4 to the footer. This made it easy to keep the rebar vertical as well as provided some support to the footers during the pour.



Next up, I'll do a post on pouring the footers.


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## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

Back for the post on pouring the footers. To pour the footers, I hired a pump truck and 7 yards of cement from a local company. For those interested, the mix was a 4000 psi pump mix with 1.5# of fiber per yard, water reducer--because it was cold the morning I was pouring--and a low water to cement ratio of ~0.42).

Once the pump gets going, things move pretty fast. He probably could've pumped all 7 yards in 10 minutes or less. Here you seem him getting started on the first side.

We had two guys following the pump guy. I vibrated behind the pump guy to both help self-level the cement and to remove any voids. Behind me came a friend with a concrete rake who leveled out the concrete and get it flush with the top of the forms.


Pumping finished, screeded, but before floating.



After we finished pumping, vibrating, and screeding, we ate some breakfast burritos and waited for it to set up some. About an hour later we went back out to finish it. This is probably not absolutely necessary, but makes for a nicer surface to work with. Plus, it gives an opportunity to practice floating in case I need to do work someday where it actually is visible.

Next post will cover through laying block for the stem wall.


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## turfnsurf (Apr 29, 2020)

Wow @mrigney I applaud you and your journey. I wish I had the knowledge base to build something on my own and the land to do it.

Posting to subscribe to the thread and I can follow along throughout the process.


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## typed by ben (Jul 12, 2021)

Extremely cool to see the process and a guy doing what he can on his own. Where you live, what is the maximum you are allowed to put under a roof before a permit is required?


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## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

@typed by ben Good question about the permit. Where I am (north Alabama, in the county outside of Huntsville), they don't require permits for anything. My entire house was built without pulling a single permit. Which also means no inspections. Which is a huge win when you're doing something yourself...not always a huge win when you end up not trusting your builder.

@turnsurf I don't really have a background in this sort of stuff. Just have spent a lot of time reading and watching youtube videos, and then being willing to try stuff and screw it up. I think that's probably one of the biggest strengths to have with projects like this...an ability to not care when things go poorly (doesn't always serve you so well in marriage...I think my wife might say she wishes I cared more when things went poorly!). But yeah....I figure for almost everything related to the project, if I screw it up, I can knock it down and fix it. The footers might've been one exception to that, but even then, there are ways to fix mistakes. Thanks for following along!


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## MasterMech (Sep 24, 2017)

Sigh. Cleaning drool out of your keyboard is hard. :bd:

Nice work!


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## turfnsurf (Apr 29, 2020)

MasterMech said:


> Sigh. Cleaning drool out of your keyboard is hard. :bd:
> 
> Nice work!


 :lol: :lol: :lol:


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## uts (Jul 8, 2019)

I've been watching Matt on the build show about 3xteror insulation and his home hvac setup. Fascinating stuff, looking forward to this. His attic automatic stairs are awesome too.


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## Pannellde (7 mo ago)

mrigney said:


> … Where I am (north Alabama, in the county outside of Huntsville), they don't require permits for anything. My entire house was built without pulling a single permit. Which also means no inspections.
> 
> …


What…? 😳. I am in Mad Co and am doing a bathroom renovation. They definitely pulled permits for this work. I've already had the inspector out for the plumbing rough in. I gave him a tour of the work performed, he gave the thumbs up and he said he'd be back for final.


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## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

Pannellde said:


> mrigney said:
> 
> 
> > … Where I am (north Alabama, in the county outside of Huntsville), they don't require permits for anything. My entire house was built without pulling a single permit. Which also means no inspections.
> ...


Move south to Morgan County and things get a lot more lax Trust me, I was shocked when my builder told me, and I then verified with the county.


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## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

Well, I've left everyone in suspense long enough. Figure I should update this thread so that folks don't think I just left concrete footers out there indefinitely. Today....block laying. So, as I stated in the original post, I'm building this garage more like a house. I could've easily poured a monolithic slab with a thickened edge (that's what my house is and about all people do around here for non-crawl space houses), but that makes it really difficult to do underslab insulation, which I wanted to do for the garage (and no, I'm not doing hydronic heating...just not worth the $$ for this project). So to easily do underslab insulation, you need to do either a formed concrete stem wall or a block stem wall. I went with a block stem wall. Forming up a concrete stem wall would probably spell disaster for someone inexperienced like me. Block is a lot more forgiving.

Before getting started, I had already determined that I would need 3 courses of block to be able to grade the structure properly when we're done. I also had already marked corners with a plumb bob and the batter boards I put up at the beginning. I'd also had one of the local concrete companies drop off about 170 CMU blocks and 85 bond beam blocks for the top course (the bond beam provides horizontal/shear stability to the structure as you'll see in some later posts). Weekend 1 was to get the corners laid. Mind you, I've never laid block in my life, so anything would've been a success. The corners are important because they will ensure your building is square. You can get away with a little bit (b/c you'll still have a chance to square up the building when you put down your sill plate when you frame), but you want to spend as much time as necessary to get this right.

In this first picture, you can see the first course for the first corner that I did. I laid out the block w/o mortar first, then took them all off and plunged in. I borrowed a mixer from a friend that allowed me to mix up batches pretty easily (Type S mortar, 3:1 sand to mortar ratio roughly, enough water for a consistency that sticks to your trowel after you "set" it and turn it upside down").


After getting the first course laid, I went ahead and laid the two subsequent courses, for a little pyramid action at the corner. You'll notice the top course is a bond beam course, meaning the webbing has been knocked out of the top half of the cinder block. This will allow rebar to places horizontally around the entire top course. Throughout the corner laying process, I used a torpedo level (to check outside->inside level), then used a 2' and a 4' level to check for plumb and for straightness.


Progress. Once the corners are laid, life becomes a lot easier. Using a string stretcher, you run a string from corner to corner and then can just lay your block to the string, using gentle taps to nestle it up to the line. Here, I'd gotten the first course of my first wall done.


Moving on, here's one wall complete.


For better perspective of the whole structure (and some of the house in the background). Where this picture is from will be the behind the garage. That side of the house is technically the side of the house (the stoop you see is the laundry room). The garage will be side entry and the driveway will come up and turn into the garage near the stopp.


Here are 3.5 walls complete (+ a bonus of the barn). The last course I left out for now so that I could run the plumbing out of the structure to hook up to the septic. 


Yes, we'll have a full bathroom in the garage. And no...I've never roughed in plumbing before. So that will be the subject of the next post.


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## HomerGuy (Jun 5, 2017)

Very nice! I was a little surprised that you took the time to form up the footings, and not just pour into the excavated trench. But it does make it a lot easier to get the top level with forms. And when you are a DIY, it isn't always easy to closely time the excavation and the concrete, so its easier to over excavate and set forms.

Bravo on the finished footing. I don't think I have ever seen a footing with tooled edges before!


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## mrigney (Jun 6, 2017)

Wow, been a while since I've updated this. Have a made a fair amount of progress since the last post. Framing is getting close to complete (just have rafters to put up more or less). I'll pull together some pictures and given an update soon!


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