Garage Storage Update

If there's one thing I want to avoid this winter, it's having a garage which is too cold to work in. Which has been the case ever since we moved to Michigan.

The core issue with the garage lies in the overall lack of proper insulation. Apparently, in Michigan, they don't believe in insulating the garages. I'm not sure why, since winter seems to last about a million years around here. But when we bought this house - brand new - there wasn't any insulation in, on or around the garage. The garage doors weren't even insulated. Or sealed. In fact, if you look at the doors from the side, there's nearly a half-inch gap all around the edges, between the door and the door frame. Sure, they put a rubber trim flap around it, but that doesn't help. The winter winds blow right past that, and fill the garage with sub-zero air.

I don't like sub-zero air. Not when I'm trying to work with my tools. My metal tools. Which get very, very cold when exposed to those sub-zero temperatures.

During the spring and summer, I built a wall between the two parts of the garage (the 2-car portion and the 3rd bay). There was already a partial wall there; I merely extended it so that it goes all the way across the garage, making the third bay a separate room.

The plan was to completely seal off the 3rd bay so that it can be used for a winter workshop. But I really can't make the 3rd bay into a separate room until I figure out a way to seal off that 3rd bay garage door so that the cold air doesn't get in every time we open it.

The only problem remaining is the garage door opener.

See, the ceiling of the garage is twelve feet up, but the garage door opener track is only eight feet off the floor. Which leaves me with four feet of 'dead' space above the door opener track which can't be used. For anything.

I want to remove the entire garage-door opener apparatus, but frankly, that didn't make it past the Project Planner. There is the fear that it might not ever go back the way it was. (And that is a likely scenario.)

So ... what to do?

Well, to start out, at the very least, I want some extra storage space up there. So I took the two 4x4 platforms I'd built at the beginning of the summer and put them up like giant shelves. That will give me 32 square feet of additional storage.

(You can see them above the power tools in the picture.)

Of course, I can't use the entire 32 square feet if the garage door is allowed to slide up the rails because it will hit anything that's being stored up there. So until I come up with another idea, I have to leave a narrow lane open for the garage door to go through.


So it's not perfect. But it's a start.