Great garage MAKEOVER
By Amy Newman
What began as a simple project to improve his Spenard home’s energy efficiency morphed into a six-year project that completely transformed Dennis Walworth’s dark, dingy, cluttered garage into a well-organized, brightly lit workspace. That garage, as the joke among friends goes, is now nicer than his home’s kitchen.
“The garage used to leak like a sieve,” Dennis recalls. “The overhead doors were old and drafty and the walls were riddled with holes, including one somebody had drilled to run an electrical cord outside,” he says with a laugh.
In 2008, hoping to improve the home’s 2-star energy rating, Dennis requested a home-energy audit from the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation. In addition to the drafty doors and hole-y walls, drywall was tenuously attached to the ceiling and falling down in spots.
As it turned out, that was the least of the garage’s problems.
When contractors began work on the garage, they uncovered a host of structural issues. There were broken joists in the ceilings and walls. The sagging ceiling was supported by a railroad truss, which Dennis believes was installed before the 1964 earthquake, but it was held in place by nothing more than two-by-fours.
“There were no nails, no fasteners,” Dennis says, still incredulous at the ceiling’s precarious nature. “There’s not even a stud on the other side. It’s astonishing that this thing survived.”
Realizing he was in deep, Dennis decided to completely gut the garage and rebuild it into a bright, pleasant, energy-efficient space that would serve as a functional extension of the home.
Insulation installed inside the garage framing gave the exterior walls a higher energy rating than those in the house, Dennis says, and the drafty garage door was replaced with one that had a higher insulation rating. New drywall took care of the Swiss cheese style walls and eliminated another problem – a family of mice that had nested in the crawl space and kept finding their way into the house.
Raven Electric installed hanging 1,000-watt light fixtures, which provide ample illumination when Dennis is doing his woodworking projects.
“It’s like high noon in Mexico when the ceiling fluorescent lights are turned on," he says. "It's really nice in the wintertime, too. You can come out here and it just feels good.”
Most importantly, the ceiling’s internal structure was repaired, and everything securely reinforced with micro beams.
“You can still see the unevenness,” Dennis says as he points out the slightly sloped ceiling. “But it’s solid. There’s no more sag.”
With the structural work complete, Dennis began working on the garage’s aesthetic and functional details. One of the first things to be overhauled was the floor. A giant crack, a remnant of the 1964 earthquake, runs across much of the floor. And something had to be done about its color:
“Pink!” Dennis says. “Who paints their garage slab pink?”
Repairing the crack was easy, but making the floor level would cost more than Dennis was willing to spend; yet the uneven surface prevented him from installing tiles or a poured-on epoxy. In the end, he went with a semi-transparent, acid-etched terracotta stain. The floor stands in stark contrast to the garage’s white walls, yet gives the space a warm, inviting feeling – if it weren’t for the presence of a vehicle, you could almost forget you were in a garage.
Because Dennis wanted an uncluttered workspace, he installed Gladiator GearTrack’s on the walls to hold his skis and random tools. Metal Gladiator storage cabinets line the walls and help control the rest of the clutter; extra-large rubber storage totes sit on top of each unit, providing additional storage. An added bonus: The closed cabinets keep everything free of dust and dirt. And because they’re rolling, he can easily reconfigure the space whenever necessary.
His workbench takes up half of the garage’s back wall, and underneath he installed one of his favorite features.
“If you’re going to have a man cave, you gotta have a stereo, right?” he says, plugging his iPod into a tiny amplifier he installed underneath the workbench. Speakers positioned on either side of the garage door are held in place by custom brackets that attach to more Gear Tracks.
Further adding to the uncluttered look, Dennis walled off the water heater and furnace, both of which are located in the garage’s back left corner, and added a door for easy access.
The remodel project took much longer than expected due to a neck injury he needed to recover from. But after six years, Dennis feels the remodel is finally complete.
“I’m tickled with it,” he says. “It was a creative project, and I really liked trying to figure out the aesthetics and function. That’s kind of what I was after.”
