insulating garage attic

[Shack]

Depending on what you have (room in attic truss) you might consider a stair way against the back wall instead of the ladder.

That would mean framing in a stair well and adding a door.

Me think Man Cave up there.

You'd insulate it differently also.

ST has a great idea. Depending on your ceiling height. I have 14' side walls on my attached and as I get older I see the value in a couple of my buddies doing this. We aren’t getting younger and stares with a railing sound much better than pulling down the folding style when I am 64.

If you did get Loft or Attic trusses Picks, which I assume you did, the builder/framer should provide you with info pertaining to your allowable PSF (pounds per square foot) with a given uniform load, or some calling it storage load, ceiling load or dead load. I would assume you are around (does not quote me and please ask your builder or framer ) 40lb per square foot if your trusses look like this:

I would honestly go with 3/4" T&G plywood for strength and tying everything together. Just a good board that can support the weight. One thing to remember though (!!!!) is the weight of the flooring board needs to be added into and go against your over PSF. This will probably put you safely in the 300lbs per square yard area, with a little extra cushion. Just put the gun safe somewhere else.

Yep non-faced bats are the best for R value and like said putting them in with their V barrier paper side up you are not doing it right. Double barrier than and three temp differences mean moisture. Heat rises so the best place to put insulation effort is in the ceiling. When you ask your builder about the PSF rating ask him who built the trusses (or provided them). If possible you can raise the flooring to accommodate blown insulation or doubling up on the insulation bats. Run the lower series between the trusses and the upper series across the lower to double your R value. You do not want to push or pack the insulation (maybe has been said already) as you lower the R value. Natural Gas is not cheap. As you finish off your house and start up a nice heated garage, year round use will follow. A decade of heat loss to skimping on the insulation will cost a guy more than if he put the extra bucks into to it no. The rest of the garage is very easy to seal up with a little time, the drive to know how and what to look for. Adjusting overhead doors is something I never did 10 years ago. Now I am a pro and pride myself on how efficient my garage is to maintain year round. Plus keeping tabs on this helps with keeping mice out, even with the doors open on a nice fall day.

The biggest thing I can say is before you start thumping on the attic or insulation, think about your shop lighting (florescent sunken/recessed is nice & best), the positive idea of a sub panel for the garage & additional electrical outlet boxes first. Once you insulate and cap, it is hard to go back. Also think of any low voltage wiring for audio speakers and even your T-stat. Then toss in even maybe the idea of Ethernet (cat6), coaxial or HDMI for the main area of the garage. Looks much better run hidden and fish-taped from above down to a clean cut Rotozipped hole with an after the fact receptacle box sunk in. Never even know. Why run this:

When you can drill a hole in the upper stud wall plate, fish-tape down and pull back up your 12-2 elec. cable and push one of these in instead:

Know I am getting ahead of the project here, but I really recommend running a sub panel out to the garage, having it setup for at least one 220/240v dual breaker (just encase welding becomes a thought or you want to run an air compressor worth a darn that can run a pneumatic sander. Heck evens maybe a thru-wall mounted A/C unit down the road). I also suggest going 20amp with all receptacles. You will learn to appreciate this extra 5amps over time.

If you are lucky & have an electrician as a friend/relative and he/she likes to "hang", a couple hundred dollars with just running the needed stuff now and finishing down the road (or not) will add thousands of dollars of value to the house. It will give it that extra feature to make the sale. You can always get a sale at Menards and my suggestion is look on-line for extra/surplus/left over from the job, pennies on the dollar (good though) stuff. I just seen a couple hundred feet of CAT6 cable and boxes for free, plus some sheet rock. Plus you might want a high-def-surround sound-flatpaneled-net streaming-very cool/beet the Jones shop down the road. Heck just thinking about what to run up in the loft is needed like additional lights or turning into a sub-man cave like ST mentioned. That is the way to roll. I am glad I did most all of this before enclosing the attic. Mine aren’t even half the garage as some of my buddies. Mine saw finishing action back around 2005, in the non-digital Stone Age. Don not forgets about a dual wash tub & its plumbing. Man I could go on, but I love garages and why not? Who will?

My wife was against all this when it was going down. Today she when she entertains her friends here, they always end up out in the garage at some point. That is when the loft sub-man cave comes into play. Then as the kid grow up a pole shed is erected & converted to a mega man cave.

[picksbigwagon]

wow shack, that was a lot to digest.....there is no room for a stairway with the way the garage is laid out, well I could but it would chew space in the third stall, and why would I want to that. I have no desire for a room above the garage, just some place for xmas decorations and other boxes of [PoorWordUsage] that we never seem to get rid of and can't throw away either.....I will be insulating it and putting in plywood as we need new area's to store stuff.

Now, I am intereseted in how to adjust the garage doors since we will be putting an electric garage heater. Oh yeah, our builder puts the electrical panel in the garage, so no need for a sub panel....

[Shack]

I do love garages and I will give ya some more to digest.

Yeah if space is at a premium, stairs is not an option. When I haul something large(er) up there it takes a strong drive to get up the push to do it, but it gets done.

That was about 5-6 buddies ideas crammed in to that post. I just liked hearing everything and plucked what I could if I had the will and means. Funny what can be thought of when sitting in a rocked garage? Do you have over 10' side walls or did you have the builder include the sheet rock or was it included from the get go? I am sure code has changed but under 10' the builder in our county is only required to sheet rock and tape any part of the attach garage that is up against the house walls. I lucked out and my builder and either did I that in our county any attached garage with over 10' side walls (per code) has to be fire-stopped though out which included the first layer of tape. I was going to rock it but got it as a toss in because the papers were already signed. Side walls were insulated by my builder also because I was not going to remove the sheet-rock, but I did the attic after we closed.

Very cool the panel is in the garage. If that is where the builder put it you had a smart and good builder or where the service came in warranted it. I was stuck with it on the opposite end of the house but at least got it positioned in a closet. I hate when the builder just tosses it in the middle and rear which always seems to be in the middle of a family room. It looks so nice and one more thing to trim out.

Adjusting your garage doors just takes trial & error. Best thing to do is do it during the day so you can see the gaps. The guys who installed my two front overhead doors that came with the house where kind of sketchy looking and their final end result reflected the same. In my case the main issue was in how they installed the vinyl weather seals/strips. They were not straight at all, so I save myself a bunch of adjusting hassle by just pulling the nails out of the weather strips and reinstalling them straight. The big gaps were on the top strip. Most of it was not even close to touching. You want the soft edge of the seal on the strip (when the door is fully closed) to just lightly hit the door. Across the top does not have really much adjustment on a 16-18' door when a gap is had in the middle. If you can eyeball the door pretty straight it would best just to remove the weather strip and manually reinstall with the door closed allowing the soft tip to just rest on the door like I said above.

If the door is warped at the top it will take a little effort to straighten it out. I would use something long like a 2"x4" or 2"x"2, 3-4' long and a mallet to tap it straight. Using this will displace the blow and does not cause a direct dent. If there is a bow that cannot be corrected by reinstalling the weather strip (would look as straight as a recurve bow when finished), when the door is fully open cut a length of board to just fit on the ends where the door looks straight and have a yourself and another person gently push up till the panel eyeballs straight. Not too much or it will bow out the other direction.

Now adjusting the sides is basically just slightly loosening (tight enough to no free slide but loose enough to allow movement with effort) the wall mount bracket nuts form their studs and either pushing or pulling "the track" (not the wall mount bracket) to seal the small gaps. You just want that soft edge of the seal touching enough to stop air flow. Pressing too much can cause marks on the door over time or rips and even tears. If you have large gaps to seal, work on the smaller ones first because you will get an idea of how it goes without trying to redirect the track. I like to loosen the nut closest to the gap I am fixing and then the one right above and right below that nut. This way you are spreading out the adjustment to allow the door to roll smoothly.

Once in a blue moon (my brother in-laws new place last fall) you will have to adjust the wall brackets to manipulate the track to get the gap sealed. In this case it is just good measure to take a Sharpie pen and outline where the bottom end of the track meets the concrete and little taps with Sharpie on all four corners of the brackets you need to loosen. This way if it does not work out you can easily bring everything back to where it was before you started.

Minor gaps at the bottom when the door touches the concrete can be adjusted by bending the bottom lip of the door. Worse case is the seal if messed up and should be replaced or the slab has an issue. Uneven from side to side that has to door with spring tension and lifting cable length. That is another topic.

[soldoncass]

Best place for an electric panel is in the mechanical room in the basement. When we had a choice, that was the easiest place to get to it , for any add-on circuits. There were some power companies that told you WHERE THE METER WAS GOING(4' back from the closest corner to their transformer). If you wanted it in a different place.....too bad for you. We did some remodeling jobs that had the panel in the garage, with a rocked ceiling and several walls......electricians HATED it.

[soldoncass]

I was getting worried ,for you, about all these extravagant "man cave" ideas flying around. A simple plywood floor, and a ladder will do just fine. One thing about those "drop-down stairs"....it is hard to maintain the required fire-code sheetrock separation between house and garage with those. A lot of times the ceiling rock is used for that, so something to consider, before you use one.

[Shack]

soldoncass I actually ran the cable for 16 "after the rock" receptacle boxes out of the 17 boxes in my garage. Using a fish-tape to pull then you just feed from the hole at the top plate of the stud wall down to the cut out opening. Tape up the 12/2 cable to the fish-tape and pull back up the needed length (did have a spool of 12/2 which was attached to a cart that made is much easier when pulling) it only took minutes. When I ran all the cables back down inside the wall to the sub panel I used a small dia (1/8"?) nylon rope that when fully pulled the distance of the wall I had at least that distance left out on the top part of the wall and down at the opening for the sub panel. Ran a couple cables nice & clean, one on one side and the other on the other side and one down the middle between the vapor and R19. This gave me a nice gap to work with when the cables were tightened up a little. The rope got tied off at each end and elec. tape the cable going to the sub panel to the rope went down and pulled, went back up and did the next one. I even kept the rope in between the studs but over one where I ran my low voltage & A/V so if I need to run something from the attic down to the sub panel or basement in the future it would only take a matter of minutes. My sub is on the wall that is attached to the house so I can access the behind lower part. I would assume this has to be the same with Picks house.

Believe me though, I thought the same about running those wires and cables after the fact. I put it off till I had to do it which was about 2-3 years after moving in and when I installed my heater and needed to insulate. It took like only two days and a day with my buddy elec. and it was up in & running. The low voltage stuff & A/V took maybe two more days at the most. These are days where I mean a Saturday & Sunday. It was one of those times/things I wondered why I had not just done this (had my heater which was another thing I kept putting off) right after I moved in. I could have had the builder install them prior but I was getting non-buddy quotes that were coming in less than half installed and juices flowing.

[JohnMickish]

We did some remodeling jobs that had the panel in the garage, with a rocked ceiling and several walls......electricians HATED it.

Yep, pretty much impossible to add circuits at that point without some major surgery. If the rock isn't mudded it's not bad but if it's finished you really don't have much for options. If the wall isn't rocked now or if you want to cut it up because your going to do some sheetrock work anyways, the thing to do would be to run a few 12-3s and maybe a 10-2 from the panel up to the attic, dead ended in a 6X6X4 box that is in an accessable location for any future work you might need. If you have the breaker space for future work thats great, but if not you might want to add a sub panel off the main panel at this time and run some spairs up so you can get to them later.