Eliminating Drywall Ceiling In Attached Garage

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shane2943

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Hi everyone!

For my first official post outside the Introductions section, I'll ask what might be an odd question.

But first, to describe my setup. I have a 2-car attached garage in my house. It shares one common wall with the house and the other 3 walls are exterior walls. The ceiling height is 8 feet at the head of the garage, and then a step down of 3 inches makes the ceiling height about 8'3" over most of the garage. It has two single doors instead of one large double door (I hate that but live with it). The distance from the top of the ceiling joists to the highest point of the roof deck is approximately 4' and tapers off from there. The roof peek is centered over the garage and runs from the front of the garage to the back. There is a ridge vent installed on the peek over the garage. The attic space above the garage is shared to the attic space over the rest of the house. The ceiling above the garage is uninsulated.

OK, now that I've descibed my setup, I want to tear down the drywall ceiling above the garage so that I can:
a) have more space for things - there's not really room up there to install a drop down ladder and floor the space up there. It'd be better for me to be able to just lay long pieces of wood across the tops of the joists for storage and/or install a pully lifted shelf.
b) have more ventilation - as it is, the garage in the summer stays about 10 degrees cooler than the attic and for those that live in Texas, THAT'S REALLY HOT! ;) I figured the ridge vent might help a bit there. Maybe I'm wrong. In the winter time, the garage does stay pretty warm...but then again, I'd rather have it cool in the summer than warm in the winter.
c) Have the space to hang a garage filtration system - with the 8' ceiling, the filteration system would hang too low and get in the way of things

I do plan to extend the common wall up to the roof deck and seal it, effectivly making the main attic space smaller.

What are the pros/cons of my idea? Is it lunacy? Have I been drinkin too much cough syrup? Are the Halloween gouls effecting my BRAIN? :eek:

Thanks in advance! :beer:
 
What are the pros/cons of my idea? Is it lunacy? Have I been drinkin too much cough syrup? Are the Halloween gouls effecting my BRAIN? :eek:

Thanks in advance! :beer:

Possible lunacy, cough syrup poisining, sugar overload from to many Butterfingers;)...never rule anything out, but could you post a pic of the garage ceiling and also the attic framing?
 
The garage and it's ceiling will be easy. The attic framing above the garage.....not so much since the only attic access is on the complete opposite end of the house so I'd have to crawl all the way over there.

I'll do it though. Done it before. ;) Gimme a bit...
 
OK, got the pics. When I said that the garage shares a common wall, it's more like 1.5 common walls but that's neither here nor there. Would just make separating the garage from the rest of the attic a bit more of a pain, but doable.

Ok, I'll do my best to describe the photos:

This is the front of the garage, taken from the bed of my pickup. You can see the roof ok from here:
IMG_3189.jpg


This is a shot inside the open door:
IMG_3187.jpg


This is a shot at the ceiling from the head of the garage by the door into the house:
IMG_3191.jpg


This is a shot from the same spot, but aiming across the garage towards the back corner:
IMG_3192.jpg


[continued on next post]
 
This shot is taken off to the right of the garage so the peak of the roof and ridge vent can be seen:
IMG_3190.jpg


All 3 of these shots were taken from the back wall of the garage towards the front of the garage (where the two garage doors are). Please forgive the ghettotastic wiring. Yet another project I have to do.
IMG_3182.jpg

IMG_3183.jpg

IMG_3186.jpg


Hope those shots were what y'all were after. Bout the best I could get. There ain't much room in the attic of this house.
 
What you are doing was exactly what I did to my garage last December. Because of the lack of space in the attic portion, I lowered the entire ceiling one foot. I then installed a low opening roll up door, and cut a hole to access the new attic space. Below are some pics of my garage.

Garage & Shed Pics (1).jpg

Garage & Shed Pics (46).jpg

Garage & Shed Pics (47).jpg

Garage & Shed Pics (48).jpg

003.jpg
 
DANG! You gotta nice garage there, my friend.

Actually, what I'm wanting to do does differ from what you did in that I want the attic space, and the garage space to be one in the same. The only ceiling I want above the garage are the ceiling joists and roof deck above that. I want to get rid of the drywall ceiling all together. It seems as though you have a bit more attic space than I do, even if I were to drop the joists down a foot. There's really not much space up there which is why I nixed the idea of flooring it and installing a drop-down ladder.
 
Thanks for the compliment! I now understand what you are trying to do, but I think it will be more work than you think. I have about the same headroom in the attic (about 4 1/2'), and once it was insulated and lined with 1" plywood, there was more room than I imagined. Your firewall is an important fire block and mandatory by most fire codes. This means if you remove it from your ceiling, it may come back to haunt you, unless you line the entire lower roof ceiling with 5/8" drywall. You would also need to add structure and support to keep your walls square and your roof from potentually sagging.

I think the easier solution is to cut a hole, box it in, relocate the exposed romex, line with plywood, and call it a day.
 
Not quite sure what you mean by adding support to keep my roof from sagging. I don't want to remove any supports. I intend fully to keep every 2X10 and 2X4 that is currently there in it's place. I only want to remove the drywall to open the space up.

Now, your firewall statement really makes some sense to me and I didn't consider that before.

What's romex?

And thank you for the reply! :beer:
 
OK, I assumed you wanted to eliminate the 2 x 10's along with the drywall. If you left them intact, you would not lose strength in the structure. Drywall as a fire break will still be a consideration for you, if you chose to eliminate the drywall. The romex I was referring to are the wires laying on top of the 2 x 10's, which power your garage door and ceiling lights.
 
Shane, in your first post you mention attic heat and adding ridge vent, looking at your photos I don't see any soffit vents to allow for air intake into the attic. Ventilation is a 2 part equation. For the ridge vent to exhaust it has to be able to intake air. Sort of a chimney effect developes, hot air rises and draws cooler air in at the soffit, lower portion of the roof. Are there vents at the soffit?
 
OK, I assumed you wanted to eliminate the 2 x 10's along with the drywall. If you left them intact, you would not lose strength in the structure. Drywall as a fire break will still be a consideration for you, if you chose to eliminate the drywall. The romex I was referring to are the wires laying on top of the 2 x 10's, which power your garage door and ceiling lights.

I really just want to be able to have a little extra storage above the joists (accessable by step ladder) like laying long pieces of wood that are currently on the floor across the joists to store them. I would want to build a shelf attached to pullys that would raise up in between 2 ofthe joists for more storage. And then, I'd want to hang the filteration doohickie in the attic space from the roof joists. The filteration system would hang too low and get in the way with the drywall ceiling in place.

How could I get around the fire break issue? I certainly don't want to create a space that is unsafe or not up to code.

oooOOOooooh! That's what Romex is! Mainly, it just needs to be cleaned up, and by cleaned up, I mean stapled to the joists instead of just laying across them.

Thanks, man! :beer:

Shane, in your first post you mention attic heat and adding ridge vent, looking at your photos I don't see any soffit vents to allow for air intake into the attic. Ventilation is a 2 part equation. For the ridge vent to exhaust it has to be able to intake air. Sort of a chimney effect developes, hot air rises and draws cooler air in at the soffit, lower portion of the roof. Are there vents at the soffit?

The house does have soffit vents all the way around, but I would argue that it doesn't have enough soffit venting. That's another project for me. Some of the soffits and trim are rotting, so I need to replace the soffits and trim anyway. I was wanting to go with a 1.5" continuous soffit vent all the way around the house. Currently, it has 3X6 oval shaped vents about every 6-8 feet.
 
No, you may not! Those are personal and private! :mad:


(I'll take a pic when I get home. :D )
 
OK, here's a couple pics of my holes....err...soffit vents:

The vents are actually more like 3X8 instead of 3X6. But that's neither here nor there because either way, it's not enough venting.
IMG_3193.jpg


And here's the spacing:
IMG_3194.jpg
 
Thanks for the pics. The reason for asking was that I've been involved with lots of new house construction, and never seen an oval soffit vent. Heck, what a great place to install some 6"x9" speakers!
 
Shoot, that's what I got this for (notice the upper corners and the sub at the lower right):
IMG_3195.jpg


What I NEEED is some decent venting (eventually). ;)
 

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