Making a garage dual purpose

[ellgee]

We've decided this is the year to finally get cracking on sorting our garage!

It's an attached garage, with a double width electric roll-up door, and the garage then widens out towards the back. The doorway to the house is on the left hand wall.
We'd like to keep it to use as a garage (ie, still have room to park the car in and use the inspection pit), but we also want to make better use of the rest of the space - which recently has become untidy and cluttered (mainly with other people's belongings!)

The floor is concrete, and the ceiling is around 9.5 foot high, with wooden joists around 18 inches apart, below a flat felted roof.

Along the back wall is a 12 foot long, six foot high, stretch of racking,which we want to box in, with doors along the front. To the right of the racking we'd like to build a partition wall, so that we can store bikes/lawn mower etc behind.

So where do we start? I have a few questions, excuse my ignorance with some of this stuff!

What's the best way to make the boxing in/framework for the racking? Could we attach posts to the concrete floor, and 9.5 foot high ceiling? If so, how? What's the max door width/weight compared to post thickness? ie how many doors (mdf sheets?) would we need along a 12 foot stretch?

We'd like to box the ceiling in as a lot of dust falls from it. What should we use? mdf/ply wood etc? What about insulation, should we bother with that?

One of the walls that will be "on show" is old (original) red house brick and is looking a bit tatty - if we got this pointed & cleaned up, is there something we could coat it with to keep it clean & shiny? or would we be better off painting it with masonry paint?

There might be a bit of electrical work needed - ie to move existing lights & sockets to new locations - would we need a qualified electrician to do this?


Would we need planning permission for any of this?
Would we need building regulations?


Open to any ideas & suggestions! Many thanks!

 

[pna]

Some thoughts (and I'm not a tradesman, just interested in DIY).

You can drill holes in concrete and there are metal fixings you can buy to attach to wooden posts to secure them to the floor and/ or other areas. I would look into building a rectangular frame (or frames) to cover the 12'x6' area. I would look at bedroom wardrobes to get an idea of how big the doors can be compared to what they are attached to.

As far as I know, plywood or mdf could be used to box in the roof, but I would look to seal/ paint it first in case of a leak. If its too cold, then you could think about insulation, but from what you have said, its still primarily going to be a garage, and I suspect if your garage door is like mine, there is a big gap to let draughts in, so the insulation will probably have little effect!

Yes there is a sealant you can treat the walls with - don't know about product names - I would ask at a shop.

Get an electrician to do the electrical work.

From the description of your plans, the garage is still going to be a garage, so I wouldn't think planning permission comes into it - but like I said, I'm not a tradesman.

 

[fido]

Rather than fix vertical posts direct to the concrete floor the usual method would be to fit a bottom rail and then fix your posts to that. I would not make the doors more than 600mm wide. Your partition wall should be of similar constructin but of 100 x 50mm timber at 600mm centres. This is so the 2400 x 1200mm sheets of plasterboard or other sheet material can be fitted vertically.
I'm not sure what you have in mind regarding the ceiling, do you mean for part or all of the garage? If only for part of the garage you could have a suspended ceiling to match the 2400mm height of the partition sheets. Doing a suspended ceiling for the whole area would be too big a job so you would do better to fit plasterboard to the existing roof timbers. In either case some fibreglass insulation would be worthwhile. The way I do it is using fencing staples into the joists with string or garden plant wire laced diagonally to hold the fibreglass up into the gaps between the joists.

 

[ellgee]

thanks for your advice - it gives me a few things to think about!
We hope to get started this month (been saying that for ages though!) so I'll keep you posted as I go along. Plus I'll probably have loads more questions along the way!
First job is to make the walls sound - got a bricky coming over to repoint and replace some missing/broken bricks. Then we can start on the framework!