The Audi Quattro Double - 24x20 Detached Garage

Hey there! The name is Tony and by day I am an IT Systems Admin, by night a huge car nut who loves his Audis more than he rightfully should. Been a long time lurker of this wonderful corner of the internet and have waited for the day I could finally post my own space here. Bought my first home back in May and have been spending the time since setting things up inside the way I like and generally adjusting to a fully independent bachelor life. Now that I've got most everything settled in, it was time to begin focusing on the biggest reason I bought my house - the 2 car garage.

Here is my little slice of heaven that I'll be renovating into a true space for me to store, clean, and work on my cars. And to also serve as a place for me and my friends to hang out. It's nothing special - Just a ~480sqft detached garage built in the mid-70s. But to me its a space to myself for my cars and where I have an opportunity to build it out the way I want.





The biggest issue facing me is the concrete - It's not in the best of conditions, but all things considered it's held up great since it was poured 40-some years ago. That said, I've done my research and unfortunately a repour is out of the question - the foundation and floor are one continuous pour and thus would be very difficult to replace. Instead I am going to plan for a full repair and epoxy. I've already been communicating with a local installer about the job, working out what would be needed to get this back to a nice, smooth working surface. Mostly waiting for funds to align to make it happen and, if all goes well, should happen while I have the place gutted during the renovations.





Another major problem that I'll be addressing is the electrical. Currently the entire garage is serviced by a simple 12/2 20A circuit. Needless to say that isn't going to cut it. Not one bit. Not when I am going to putting in some serious lighting, plus an electric heater, compressor, etc. The major hurdle at the moment is how I am going to run this line. Currently the 20A line comes out of the house and goes under my deck stairs in a 1/2" conduit. This needs to be replaced with a 6/3 line so I can install a full subpanel in the garage, but doing so will require a new conduit run for the wires to run in. After pulling a stair to get a better view, my only real option that I can see is to remove the stairs entirely to get better access to run the conduit. Not ideal... but luckily not a huge inconvenience. Unfortunately all the screws are rusted to f*ck and back, so uninstalling these stairs isn't likely to go smoothly. This is probably the biggest pain in the *** so far and it's literally the first thing that needs to be done.



That's about as far as I am right now. Overall, however, this is the basic plan for the garage at the moment. I am sure it will change to some degree...

• Repair concrete, lay epoxy coating
• Run a new 6/3 feed from a new dual-pole 60A breaker in the main breaker panel to a new 16-space subpanel in garage.
• Remove all existing wiring and lighting
• Install x10 5200lm 4' LED fixtures
• New interior outlets, exterior GFCI outlets
• New LED outdoor Motion-sensor spot light
• New exterior lights
• CAT6 Ethernet w/ new Ubiquiti access point
• Custom corner workbench
• Cabinets, etc.
• Walls/roof insulated (more on that later)
• Insulate garage door
• New steel man door that opens the correct way
• Liftmaster 8500
• New air compessor (make/model TBD)
• Mounted TV (possibly with in-wall speakers?)
• Build loft "space" for overhead storage
• Drywall, painting, misc finishing work

Still haven't moved most of my tools or other equipment from my parent's house yet and won't do so until the garage is in a "near done" state. What's here is just what I need at the moment. That will likely cause a lot more work as I get bright ideas of more things to change/install. But that's half the fun of it

Here's a very amateurish CAD mock-up of how I am currently envisioning setting up the garage. You'll have to excuse some of the very rough or basic drawings, but the concept is there:



Anyway... this is my introduction and looking forward to sharing my progress. Hopefully things will speed along as long as the winter weather cooperates. Once I have the electrical done, that'll allow me to really get started inside the garage with ripping out the old and starting to install the new.

For those interested in high-res photos, you can view the album I'll be posting all the photos to here:
https://flic.kr/s/aHsmySJ7xd

Well, I think it is appropriate that I would be the first to comment on this exciting project. Looks like you have some issues to tackle, but everything is possible if you are the vision and focus. You seem like you have both. Best of luck and I will be following!

Looks like you’ve got a pretty solid list of to do’s. Good luck with it all.

P.S. my little brother just picked up an Imola Yellow S4 a couple weeks ago. [emoji869]

Followed!!! Fellow VAG enthusiast here; I own a 1986 GTI that’s getting a mild restomod with a 1.8t from a 2005 GLI.


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Good luck on your build!!!

Why not Pour some self-level down on the old floor to get that smooth finish? A Concrete based self-level should do the trick for you. Just make sure you prime the floor before pouring.

Thanks for the replies

I thought about doing my own floor rehab and was originally thinking I could just get away with a grind/fill/epoxy, or even just doing a self-leveler, but ultimately the goal was to have an epoxy floor of some kind so I can detail my cars indoors and easily squeegee water/melted snow off the floor. After having a guy take a look at it and having an in-depth discussion about what I was facing to get to that goal, I realized this is one of those instances where swallowing pride and letting the pros do it is in my best interests. At the very least it'll get faster and be done right from the onset. And, if anything goes wrong, I won't be left on the hook to figure it out or deal with. In the overall scheme of things, the floor is the most important part of the project as my main working surface. Now is the best time to get it done while it's still mostly empty. All that said, hoping that if everything goes well over the next 4ish months to have that done sometime in the May-June timeframe. Have a lot to keep me busy up until that point, though

I'll jump in to watch an Audi project garage too.

10 x 5200 leds in a 2 car? I smell a new business: bring you car in for a burn out at “Tony’s Teutonic Tanning “

All jokes aside it looks like you have the makings of a great space!


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I have 20 5200L LED lights in a 650SF 2 car garage. I like it.

I can't find the link at the moment, but there's an online designer where you can punch in your space's dimensions and your desired illumination, then choose the type of fixture you want, and it'll tell you where to put them and how many. 10 should be more than enough to provide me sufficient light when detailing or otherwise working on my car, and especially so once the light grey epoxy is laid down. I subscribe to the thought that there's no such thing as "too much light" when it comes to working on cars.

That said, I am planning to split the fixtures onto two different dimmable switches so I can have finite control over how much light I need. Detailing? Give me a tan, fam. Fussing around at the workbench or just popping in to grab something? Let's not permanently blind myself.

Here's the tool:

http://www.visual-3d.com/tools/interior/default.aspx

It's brilliant, I used it and am very happy with the result.

Good luck with the garage, I like your Audi's, have had a couple of quattro A8's myself.

^^^ That's the link!

Forgot to post this...

One of the old steel rollers on my garage door blew out its bearing, so I went ahead and replaced all of the rollers with some new nylon versions. It's quite incredible how much of a difference these made. Even though I still have an overhead chain-drive opener, the door itself is much quieter than before. Well worth the $13 they cost me new!

TurboEuro88 said:

^^^ That's the link!

Forgot to post this...

One of the old steel rollers on my garage door blew out its bearing, so I went ahead and replaced all of the rollers with some new nylon versions. It's quite incredible how much of a difference these made. Even though I still have an overhead chain-drive opener, the door itself is much quieter than before. Well worth the $13 they cost me new!

Click to expand...

Welcome fellow VAG garage owner.. I also just had this happen to me in my garage. Amazing the difference in sound and smoothness! Yeah the $13 from amazon for the set compared to $13 at HD for a set of 2 really makes the choice easy too!

Moving along on the permit front... got a lot of questions answered after getting in contact with my local inspector. Don't know that I'll hire a pro but still looking to get a quote for sanity's sake.

Anyone have good sources on a smaller quanities of THHN wire? I am looking to get bundled 6/3 THHN (2 hot, 1 neutral, 1 ground) for the feed to the subpanel but can only seem to find THHN in individual per-foot or spooled amounts. My understanding is that I need to bundle the wires for the portion of the run that will be in the studs of my house and garage. Maybe I have misunderstood that part? Any input/sources on the right materials would be really appreciated.

Nice to see another S4 owner.

Small update... finally got my permit from the county to begin working on the electrical. I've been trying to scout whether I can run the feed from the main panel box up through my attic instead of the crawl space, but at this point the attic above the part of my house where the panel box isn't accessible. At least not yet. We shall see.

Update -

Finally have something resembling a plan to get the sub panel installed. By chance my Mom spoke with a customer that comes in to the bank she works at who is an electrician by trade and was willing to do some side work for me. Turns out he's friends with my Dad too, which was funny.

Anyway - Getting all the materials together, doing some light demo work (need to remove drywall inside the house to get access below the panel box), and scheduling the install. Hopefully by the end of the month I'll have a fully re-energized garage

Still waiting to hear from the electician on when work will begin. But while I wait, I decided to update the garage layout a bit to make sure the new plan will work. I am liking this better than the original plan, just not a fan of how the workbench fits with where I'll be wall mounting a PC monitor. May have to move the middle supports over and add a second set to make it work. Not sure...

Electrician scheduled for this coming Saturday... time to dive in and start the light demo. Opened up the wall and discovered that the way the walls in this corner were constructed weren't exactly as you'd expect. Somewhat of a good thing for running the flex conduit for the wire, but is going to pose some challenges when it comes time to mount the replacement drywall. The diagram I made shows better what I am dealing with. I have half a mind to tear all the drywall down in this corner and re-stud everything... but thats a lot more work. Need to get creative, it seems.

The two 12/2 lines coming down out of the panel box are for the outlet you see (fridge has its own breaker) and my sump pumps in my crawlspace. I am planning to temporarily remove them and re-wire them once the new subpanel feed is installed. The circuit for the sumps I am probably going to replace such that each pump has its own GFCI. Right now all 3 are fed off the same line with the first outlet having the GFCI. Normally not an issue, but that first pump failed this summer which tripped the GFCI for the entire circuit and thus shut off all of my pumps. Not ideal....

A little more demo work, a few more surprises. I'd love to chat with the people who built this wall - some of their choices are questionable at best.

TurboEuro88 said:

A little more demo work, a few more surprises. I'd love to chat with the people who built this wall - some of their choices are questionable at best.

Click to expand...

We could swap some stories about previous owners and their building style. Our first home had built in place kitchen cabinets using 2x4's he had used earlier on concrete forms. All covered with paneling, but still had chunks of concrete on the back side.

I did have to get creative since the family room drywall was also attached to the back of the cabinet.

Keep up the good work.

Big day is here. Finally getting the subpanel installed.

Started off yesterday by ripping out the deck stairs. It'll be nice to have them rebuilt the right way, but for now I'll be able to make do without them. I ended up re-using the garage circuit to install an in-use outlet where it came out of the house. Eventually I'd like to extend it via conduit to hook up more outlets. For now it's a temporary hookup to power the garage door opener until I have the new circuits run. Electrician (family friend) got here around 9AM and we got right to work. 4 hours later everything was installed. Glad this part of the project is done... Everything else should start following along and hopefully I'll have most of the garage electrical done by the end of the month.

On to the photos

Work has been progressing slowly since I've been feeling really under the weather lately. Seems as though something as been going around and I caught it last weekend.

Been playing around with lighting layouts over on visual-3d.com to get a sense of how many fixtures I should order. Based on wanting around 100FC @ a 3ft workplane, it's been telling me I need 12-13 fixtures but the layout it wants to use doesn't really work with how I'd like to configure the lights. Yes, its a 2-car garage but if I am actually working on or detailing either car only 1 is going to be in there. It would make most sense then that I'd have the lights in a U-shape to make sure I had a light fixture above/behind me. The problem I run into there is that it drops me to ~80FC @ 3ft workplane. Thoughts? Keep in mind the layout of the garage itself, which will have a workbench at the far end, but I'll have under cabinet lighting giving the workbench its own work lighting. It should also be mentioned that the light fixtures I'll be ordering have a higher lumen output than what I could find on visual-3d.com (5200lm vs 4600 on visual-3d), so I imagine that will help mitigate things. I am also basing all this on the garage floor being epoxy coated in a light gray which should help in reflectance as well.

Base Layout @100FC:


Revised 2-row Layout:


Ideal U-shaped Layout:

Fixed the image links. Damn imgur

Updated the image links again. Hopefully they stay working this time.

Not much visible work done, mostly have been churning through finishing the demo work. Got all the old drywall and the 10,000 nails used to hang the sheets pulled off the walls. About halfway through removing all the old electricial which will allow me to start laying out the new wiring and boxes. Should have all that, plus my subpanel ground rods installed by this weekend. Pulling the trigger and ordering my lighting this weekend so I'll have that to play with all next week/end.

One thought that's crossed my mind - what seems to be the general consensus around outlet height? My workbench will be around 37" high, which led me to think setting them around 43" to the bottom of the box would make most sense.

Here's a panorama of the garage in its current state

NICE

Got my own Audi garage project going as well. Subscribed.

Did you consider other flooring options like VCT or porcelain tile?

Frascin said:

Did you consider other flooring options like VCT or porcelain tile?

Click to expand...

I had, but neither really are the style I am after. For the purposes of my garage a usable, smooth floor is what I've been most interested in.

Productive weekend! Finished with the teardown, removing all the old electrical and lighting. This will allow me to start laying out and installing my outlets and lighting. Fairly significant milestone since from this point onward I'll be strictly focused on installing new infrastructure.

First off, all that demo material had to go somewhere. Drywall, wood, cabinets, etc. This is such a handy dumpster to have, and it'll only cost me $160 when all is said and done.



With all that stuff removed, it really opens up the garage



Then it was onto getting grounded. And by that I mean getting my ground rods installed to properly ground the subpanel. Renting a rotary hammer drill with the proper attachment made this job a breeze. I think each rod took... Maybe 10 minutes each at most. Worth the money to save my back from throwing around a sledge!

Who would have thought picking the height of my outlets and switches would be so difficult? I think I spent an hour measuring things to choose a height that works for both the sheets of drywall that will eventually go up, along with the stripe I'll be painting on said drywall. I don't want the outlets to break up the stripe at all, but didn't want to cut out both the lower and upper sheets of drywall for each outlet either. Ended up going with 48" to the top of the outlet box which seemed like a very natural and usable height for me and will mean I'll only have to cut out the bottom sheet of drywall for each box.

Also went ahead and got my TV Temporarily mounted so I have a way to watch baseball while I'm out in the garage working on things... because priorities.

Lots of small progress made over the last couple weeks... All the interior outlets are done (all 18 of them) and the leads to the switches installed so that means I am officially able to close up the panel box. Kind of a major milestone to not have to run any more wires in there. Granted, I'll be adding some more down the road whenever I get around to installing the outdoor GFCIs as well as the 220v electric heater outlet, but for now (and more importantly the electrical inspection), it's done.





I've started getting my lighting installed and somehow I seem to have messed up my measurements a bit. Being that my garage ceiling is relatively low (7.3') the garage door is really close to the joists going across the garage. I had measured the gap and according to the fixture schematics I was going to have just enough space. Test fit today now that I have all the fixtures and they won't fit - garage door is just too close. This leaves me with only being able to install six of the eight 4ft fixtures I bought unless I get creative... Which I'm going to have to get creative.

That said, it may only be temporary - I've been considering having a structural engineer sign off on allowing me to raise the joists up a bit to get more room for other things besides the lights. This may be reason enough to go down that path.... More to come soon, I hope.

Let there be light! Got 2 of my LED fixtures hung and they are BRIGHT, exactly how I wanted them. Some nags that I wasn't aware of when I bought them re: dimming, and how they are mounted, but overall happy with them. To think the garage is already this bright and I have 6 more to mount is... slightly hilarious.

In other news, have contractors lined up to quote out repair and coating the floors. Looking at about $6.50-$7.00/sqft so far, which at the very least is on par with what I had imagined. Pricey, but going to be well worth it when it's done.

Who would have thought getting a good flooring contractor out to quote out the repair/epoxy job would have been so tiresome. Out of the 10 businesses I probably contacted, I only got responses from about 3 of them. One threw out an absurdly expensive number of $10/sqft that I suspect was one of those "I'm too busy for your little garage so here's an absurd number that you'd have to be stupid or desperate to take". Another had been in contact with me over the last few weeks but kept blowing off dates to come out and give an in-person review and quote; best I ever got was a
"ballpark" number of $7.50/sqft. The last one was at least super communicative and got me the quote at ~$7.30/sqft all-in (including tax). I'm pretty happy with the number overall - $3300 is a big chunk of change but will dramatically change how this garage looks.

Electrical, at least for now, is done. I may end up reconfiguring the lighting down the road. It works, but in some ways I'm not 100% happy with the layout. The joists being so close to the garage door make things challenging. Plenty happy with the fixtures though. The outdoor light is also really bright, but thankfully it has adjustable shields to keep the light where it needs to be and away from my neighbor's windows. Currently have it set to just turn itself on in the evenings and stay on until dawn.

There's really no easy way for me to represent how bright these lights are, though. Its startlingly bright, but in a good way. The new flooring should help with that as well.

On to emptying and cleaning out the garage to prep for flooring install on the 20th. Pretty excited for that!

That is going to be a great Quattro Cave! Waiting for new flooring can be frustrating, luckily my wait is over.

Small update. Or kind of a big update.... Passed inspection today. Glad to have this behind me. Now on to getting the garage cleaned out for next week's flooring install. Finally some progress!

Been anxiously awaiting today. This has been the first week in a month or two where we've had great weather, but of course today is the only day this week it will rain! Luckily the weather should hopefully hold off enough to get this finished. Time will tell...

Yikes. If it isn't too late, I'd just have them prep the floor. Sandblast/scour everything, repair spalling, V out any cracks, and then do a final grind. I paid $900 for the floor prepped like this, and then installed a moisture stop coating that soaked into the slab, since it doesn't have a vapor barrier. Then I coated it myself with Rock Solid polycuramine. It's holding up great and the whole thing cost less than $1300.

Weather held off enough to get the job done. In fact it didn't start to rain until they were finishing up. Ground, leveled, sealed, and coated. Now the worst part - waiting for it to cure. Giving the floor as much time as it needs. Thankfully I'll be pretty busy the next 2 days and won't be tempted to go in there much. Guys did a fantastic job. Excited to walk on it and finally start finishing the garage. Feels good knowing the whole job is covered by a 21 year warranty to cover my backside of anything happens