Paul Carroll Green Tea & Games

I just want to use my garage

One of the main things I was looking forward to in moving back to Minnesota was finally getting a dedicated garage for woodworking. In Seattle, I was trying my best to make things work in half of a basement with uneven floors and no room for actual tools.

But as it turns out the second garage on our house was in worse shape than expected. I knew I would have to insulate it, but I didn’t realize I would also have to replace the roof, get a bunch of electrical work done, and spiral into a project that has taken a year and a half to complete.

This shop has been impossible to heat in the winter, or it’s been overwhelmingly hot in the summer. I’ve had a couple months in the spring & fall where it’s perfect in there – but that’s not good enough.

Shortly after moving in (August 2022) I decided to start with finishing the far end so I could get my French cleat wall going. I had already made a bunch of tool holders & organizational stuff in Seattle, so that would be an easy win.

My Dad had the idea to replace the super old windows and I’m glad I did. Those old windows were awful and it would have been a huge pain to replace them after finishing everything else.

Next up was dealing with the lighting. That single bulb by the garage door opener was never going to be enough. I found some pretty good shop lights that I could daisy chain around the room, and they have been working great. Even put the same lights in the other garage too.

This was all leading into the first winter we had here, which was absolutely brutal. Multiple feet of snow and extremely cold all winter – I couldn’t use the shop at all for months. It was a huge bummer.

Cutting a doorway

As you can see in the earlier pictures, there’s a window on the left hand side that looks into the original garage. After consulting with an architect (my uncle), it was deemed safe to just remove the old window, and cut out the brick below the opening. It made a huge mess but now I can get to the shop without having to go outside, which is amazing.

A new roof

As the winter started to thaw, it became increasingly obvious that the roof was completely screwed. All of the snow sitting on the flat roof was melting and running straight down the walls. At one point there was over an inch of standing water on the low side (right side) of the garage. I’m really glad I didn’t insulate and finish all of the walls right away.

Even though the roof was flat it still had normal shingles on it. When snow melted, all of that water would just sit on the roof and run up under the shingles. It took me a couple of months to shop around for some bids and get the roof replaced. The new roof is just one single rubber membrane, which is the right thing for a flat roof.

Now that the roof was taken care of, I could get back to the most important thing in my shop: insulating the walls and putting up even more French cleats. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with all of these, but hey, they are there for when I figure that out.

Still fighting the elements

With the walls done the shop is ready to use year round, right? Wrong. Even after all this work, the shop would still hit 100º on a hot day. I bought a new air conditioner, and even insulated the ceiling.

Unfortunately, that new window AC could barely keep the garage down around 80º. That’s almost tolerable, but the real problem is that in the winter every space heater I tried could barely get the shop to 50º. The minimum temperature for wood glue to work correctly is 45º.

This is where I hit my breaking point.

The solution I had been putting off

This entire time I knew what the eventual solution was going to be: installing a mini-split. Mini-splits are not super common in the midwest, but we had one in Seattle and it was great.

The reason I didn’t just jump into getting a mini-split was because I wasn’t sure about the cost, but also I knew it would be expensive to run another dedicated circuit to the garage. That was until I remembered there was a completely unused 20 amp circuit already running to the first garage!

All of a sudden this project turned from an annoyingly expensive ($10k+?) hurdle into an “oh wait that’s totally doable” kind of thing. I did a bunch of research and ordered a DIY mini-split kit a couple of weeks ago.

Getting an electrician to come out and reroute the power for the mini-split was actually the easiest part of this whole ordeal. All the guy had to do was move that circuit about 20 feet and then install an outdoor disconnect. Then I spent an afternoon fighting with all of the other stuff to finish installing it.

This thing has been amazing so far, but I’m really curious to see how it will handle more extreme weather. At the very least, I’m pretty sure my shop will finally be usable year round.

All that’s left to do is build a real door for that opening.