Need architect help/advice, pic inside.

[monkeyplasm]

Hello all, been lurking for quite a while and need some help.

The short version is:
1) My detached garage burned down. All the way down.
2) Building new garage in front of (adjacent to) old slab (future expansion)
3) I know my wants. Attached picture should show the pertinent details.
4) I need to get to usable plans for building and for concrete.

X) I am willing to pay if any architect(s) can help me get acceptable/usable plans. This means plans I can use to (1) get the building permit (not engineer stamped), (2) price building supplies costs (need to budget, ya know), and (3) know what to do for concrete.

This breaks down to 2 unresolved building questions plus what to do about the concrete/base/footer. Tell me if I'm off base. Advice and criticism are appreciated.

INFO:
32' deep X 44' wide. Flat ground. 2x6 walls for insulation.
8/12 roof pitch with peak along 44' width. Gutters on long sides.
Roof at 9'3" to 9'6" for 9' garage doors and because house roofline is at 9'.
1' overhang on end walls. Big overhang with 12' walls, is that too much?
Attic trusses on left, scissor trusses (2 post lift) for the last 14' on right.
Local codes are very lax. Property line setback and septic are basically it.
Cheatham County, TN. Will check on wind/snow(hah) loads.
County inspections are Footer, Frame, Final (per county Codes Dude).

UNRESOLVED QUESTION 1:
Second floor needs floor joists?
Since I want to have heavy stuff on the second floor (pool table, etc.), I assume I need floor joists for the second floor instead of just attic joists. So, if I want to keep wall height to a reasonable level I should build 11' walls with 1' floor joists on top of that, and roof joists on top of that. This gives 11' internal height for Bays 1,2,3 and reasonable attic space (approx 12' x 25') with 8/12 attic trusses. BUT, is 1' enough strength to hold up the second floor (especially around the stairs, see below)? Will also probably put HVAC into attic space.

UNRESOLVED QUESTION 2:
Stairs to Attic, The floor/attic joists need to allow for (and support?) the 5' wide stairs. I don't know how long these stairs will be, but even with "rise = run" they will be 12' long. I am amenable to having the top couple treads intrude into the bathroom area over the shower in order to keep the bottom treads away from the 36" man door (lower left of picture). I want to keep from pinching that area too much.

CONCRETE:
I have no idea what to ask for when I hire a concrete guy. Stem walls, footers, piers, frost walls, block walls, slab on grade, vapor barrier, gaaahhh!!! Intellectually I understand what these are, but I don't know what I need/should use for this building. How do I determine if I need to use a fill and how much/deep. Do I need vapor barrier. Slab will likely be 5" deep with 7"/8" deep under lift.

NOT ADDRESSED SO FAR, hopefully not until later:
Electric (110/220) and water/septic will come in underground through slab. Is this necessary for electric? Water needs placement in plans, and electric panel needs placement on a wall (probably by the man-door. I am hoping to get the garage framed and finished on the outside and only then worry about electrics. I really need to get some projects out of the yard and under cover withouit waiting for drywall, attic, wiring, plumbing fixtures, insulation, workbenches, cabinets, lighting, and finish work type stuff.

Thanks for any help you may be able to give.
Toby in Nashville

 

[StingRay]

Well I'm not an architect ( I am an engineering Technologist though). I have a 28 x 44 with 8/12 roof building that I'm working on the inside of now and a few things come to mind from things I have learned while working on mine. 32 ft is a heck of span and if you are talking floor joists you will need one helluva joist to clear span 32 feet. A typical 11 7/8" I joist will span about 20 feet absolute maximum on one foot centers for 40 psf and typical beam deflection critera. It's more likely to need some kind of support somewhere along that 32 feet which wouldn't be all that practical in a garage. If you do want it that way you will probably end up with a a support beam and some steel columns somewhere below. Check with a truss supplier to see what kind of attic room trusses are available for your application. Standard living space loads are typically 40 pounds per square foot live load. Light storage trusses are probably good for only 20 and most building codes require 100 psf for anything considered as heavy storage applications. If they suspect the space could be used as heavy storage because of the easy stair access they may default to the 100 psf requirement.

If you plan on finishing the inside of the building do it before you move all of your **** into it. It's a nightmare moving everything around afterwards.

 

[HoosierBuddy]

I'm not an architect, but here's my thoughts...based on the fact I just built about the same thing at my house. http://www.blueriver.net/~finite/garage.htm

My engineered trusses also serve as the floor joists for the second floor. I originally asked my builder to build a stepped ceiling to accomidate my lift as your drawing shows. I was somewhat surprised to find out it is cheaper to build the whole first floor with a higher ceiling (I went 13') than it is to step it up. That will also give you much more room upstairs. You do have to go with either taller doors or a large radius track (or both) if you go this route to keep your garage doors up against the ceiling when open. Whoever engineers your trusses will figure out the needed thickness. I think the base of mine are only 2X10's and that's with a 28' span + overhang...but maybe they are 2X12's. The builder said a larger span would require supports or the newer style "wooden I beam" type joists.

You want a vapor barrier under your concrete. The lift will require a minimum of 4". I went with both wire and fiber in mine...but one or the other would likely be sufficient. The best thing to do is get the installation instructions for your lift and review them prior to building. I went with heated tubing in my floor, for instance, which had to be planned in advance to keep it away from the lag bolt holes for the lift. Heating the floor meant I poured the whole thing on top of 2" of HD styrofoam. I cut that out of the way around the post areas so that the concrete there is an extra 2" thick (6" total)

My trusses were doubled on each side of the stairway (and around the dormers) and were on 4' centers. I don't know what you'd get into to move them to a 5' center. Certainly possible, but might require additional bracing and more expense. Unless 5' is a show stopper, you should consider 4'. The standard rise on a stair is about 7.5" max, so you can back into how many stairs you need. The stairs into my garage were the biggest hangup, as I wanted them to start in the house.

You can definitely do the electric after it's framed. I had Amish builders pretty much finish my framing before the electricain/hvac guy even came the first time. You should plan how you can get a heavy gauge wire from your existing home's panel to the garage and put in an entrance accordingly. Normally it's going to be conduit coming up the outside and then going in. A cleaner look might be to install the conduit before you poured the floor.

I went with 100 AMP subpanel in my garage. My lift requried single phase 220V (30 amps). I think most lifts are going to need 220. There again, you should figure out what lift you want before you even start so you can plan for it.

On your lighting...overdo it. I had an engineer design my lighting system. He speced 19 4' 2-tube T8 fixtures in my 28 X 38 garage. The electrician thought I was completely nuts...but it ISN'T too much light.

I think you should approach a builder with your sketch and see what he says. Just find a new garage you like and ask the owner who built it for them. Worked for me.

Phil

 

[mleichtle]

32' is no problem for an attic truss with 2x10 cords. If you can bump the roof pitch to 10/12, you'd gain some headroom, and the attic trusses would be alot cheaper.

 

[astroracer]

Just a few suggestions and things to think about...
1) Do a pole building style construction. No footers required. The slab floats inside the ratwalls. This will also cut down on the number of 2 x 6's needed to finish and insulate. Stick style construction will require, at the most, a 16" stud spacing. Pole building style doesn't rely on the studs for load bearing so you can finish and insulate on 24" centers.
2) Change the size to 30' x 48'. 30' is plenty deep as you have it laid out and that will ease the span a bit. You can then use a standard 32' residential truss to get your overhang.
3) You will still need a beam to support the upstairs joists but 15' can be done with a #2 2x12 on 16" centers.
4) Don't use an attic truss if you don't have to. You will need one that is custom designed anyway and they aren't cheap. You will also lose a lot of floor space for the cost so your cost per sq. ft. goes up. Build the side walls tall enough to raise a standard truss to 7' or so above the upper subfloor.
5) Scissor trusses will work over the lift if there is no upper floor over it (and the roof is lower...) If the roof is flat, your regular truss will be fine. You will need to decide what to do about the floor in that area.
6) You know where you want the hoist so have a couple of extra "post holes" dug below the frost line to form columns to support it. Saves the expense of pouring the whole floor extra thick for a couple of 8" x 12" spots...
7) The area under the stairway is perfect for your HVAC stuff. Leave it on the 1st floor if you can.
8) The framing for the stairway will support the second floor around the opening. This won't be an issue.
9) Talk to a couple of contractors and get quotes. These are usually free and will get you some professional input.
10) Get some 1/4" graph paper and layout your building. Make scale paper cutouts of all the items you plan to have in it and do some planning. Your drawing looks pretty cramped to me. I know you won't be able to open car doors on the two vehicles that are side by side...
Mark

 

[monkeyplasm]

Thanks to all for the fast replies and advice! Lots of great info.

StingRay: I don't want any support poles in the building, but I understand what you're saying about the floor joists not making it 32' on their own. HoosierBuddy's comments about attic trusses being sufficuent to carry the load (I'll check into this) give me some hope. Otherwise we're looking at a clearspan building (steel or SocketSystems) and steel beams to hold the second floor. I REALLY want to not have a steel sided building; vinyl or brick to match the house.

I agree about "finishing the inside of the building...before you move all of your **** into it" but the codes man is already on me to get the garage built and my trucks out of sight.

HoosierBuddy: (Your link doesn't work - object not found) Thanks very much for the detailed post! I hope attic trusses can be strong enough to do clearspan and hold the weight. My issue with height is that I work on INternational Harvester Scouts ande trucks. They are rather tall and heavy, especially the offraod trucks. I (think I) need a good 14+ feet of lift height. On the flip side, I'm trying to keep the external height (looka nd feel) as close to the exsiting house as possible. The new garage will be within 20 feet of the house and eventually connected by a covered deck or breezeway. Gotta keep the external dimensions in line. I think I'm locked into a stepped ceiling. Also, the stairs are going to be long enough already! Simply doubling up trusses looks promising to me.

Radiant is out of the budget partly because I plan to use thicker concrete (7"/8") to support the lift and any other tools banging around. Anybody's lift up to 12k is good with 7"+ concrete.

Wire's already in the ground from the electric to the old garage, so I'll co-opt that conduit, maybe add to it, and just run it on the wall instead of through the concrete inside the exterior wall. 220v and 110v. Will want weders and oven for powder coating; maybe an old brideport someday.

"I think you should approach a builder with your sketch and see what he says." My local contractors are more than a little flakey. One went so far as to quote $110,000 (!!!) and then just admitted he didn't do any planning, just took the rough square footage and multiplied by $50/foot. I've currently got 84Lumber trying to modify one of their 'stock' garage plans to suit, but they only do that far enough to get a lumber quote - NO building plans included! So I'm still stuck on the "get workable building plans" step.

mleichtle: I think 10/12 will give me a church steeple, albeit with more usable 2nd floor space. The house is 8/12 for part of it, 8/12 garage will match.

"and the attic trusses would be alot cheaper" Do you mean attic trusses are cheaper than floor joists, or that 10/12 attic trusses are cheaper than 8/12 attic trusses?

astroracer: No supports in the floor allowed. The car sizes are stretched to include walkaround/dooropen area. The garage doors ont he bottom wall are 18' and 9' respectively. 44' is the widest I can practically go. Although 30' instead of 32' is workable if the build cost savings aresignificant. Appreciated the advice on HVAc under stairs and stairs framing helps support second floor. As per above, height is an issue so I can't just keep building to the sky: my aesthetics, not building code.

I would LOVE to build a Steel framed building with wood walls/non-steel exterior (residential area adjacent to the house). Miracle Truss is way too expensive for the little they give you, and their trusses won't support steel I-beams for second floor (clear span) support duties. Also, I can't get an 18' garage door into the sidewall as they require their trusses at 12' centers. Sigh. Maybe this SocketSystems stuff if attic joists won't work. But I'll still lose part of the upper floor due to my own imposed height restriction - I could go 10' ceilings (except hoist bay) and then have an extra foot for upper floor height which translates into wider upper floor. Hmmm.

Still - Eventually I need to address the basic need for a source of working building plans.

 

[mleichtle]

I meant the 10/12 attic trusses would be cheaper than 8/12 attics, the peak would be 2' 8" taller, but the trusses would use smaller top chords. But I'll have to retract that statement, I work in the manufacturing of trusses, I don't know how much of the savings a retailer would pass on to you. I would think a floor joist system would need to be 2'+ deep to span 32', and crazy expensive.

 

[HoosierBuddy]

HoosierBuddy: (Your link doesn't work - object not found)

Sorry. Fixed it.

http://www.blueriver.net/~finite/garage.htm

Wire's already in the ground from the electric to the old garage, so I'll co-opt that conduit, maybe add to it, and just run it on the wall instead of through the concrete inside the exterior wall. 220v and 110v.

You'll need to make sure the wire size will handle what you want to do. You'll want a subpanel in the garage, so your breakers will be out there. That'll need to be fed directly from the house's subpanel.

"I think you should approach a builder with your sketch and see what he says." My local contractors are more than a little flakey. One went so far as to quote $110,000 (!!!) and then just admitted he didn't do any planning, just took the rough square footage and multiplied by $50/foot. I've currently got 84Lumber trying to modify one of their 'stock' garage plans to suit, but they only do that far enough to get a lumber quote - NO building plans included! So I'm still stuck on the "get workable building plans" step.

.

That's where I was stuck for 6 months. I finally had it built for time and material. You can spend whatever you want. Don't think it's going to be cheap though. If you look at my link, you'll see the garage is smaller than you are contemplating, but includes some other things. I'm in the ballpark of your estimate...not there yet...but the garage isn't done yet either.

Phil

 

[monkeyplasm]

http://www.blueriver.net/~finite/garage.htm

--Thanks. I'll check it out.

You'll need to make sure the wire size will handle what you want to do. You'll want a subpanel in the garage, so your breakers will be out there. That'll need to be fed directly from the house's subpanel.

--Wiring will probably be overbuilt since the old garage likely burned from a wiring problem. Paranoia. And, all advice is good advice.

That's where I was stuck for 6 months. I finally had it built for time and material. You can spend whatever you want. Don't think it's going to be cheap though. If you look at my link, you'll see the garage is smaller than you are contemplating, but includes some other things. I'm in the ballpark of your estimate...not there yet...but the garage isn't done yet either.

--I expect I'll have quite a bit into the garage wgen it is done, but that is way out of line for rural TN. The dang house is about $140k. No way a hollow shell with some drywall slapped up goes for that much. 4000# concrete is ~80/yard here (with fiber I think). Total concrete including apron and an additional small slab is $4000 delivered (full slab at 6"). Total concrete cost to pour should be under 10k. Got some info from 84Lumber and building materials are under $12k with three rollup doors, a man-door, and 6 windows. Same stuff back in CA would be 2 left nuts and a spleen.

Thanks for the information and encouraging words. I'll go look at your website now.

 

[bobbyd]

I'm a little hurried for time at the moment, but here is a suggestion related to the support of your second floor and span issues. Just two steel beams with strategically placed columns buried within the walls could dramatically cut down on the spans you have allowing the use of conventional floor framing. Given your requirements, I would almost look at stick framing the roof of this thing before I would use trusses of any type. Here is a quick sketch of what I'm thinking.

Note the three columns within already defined walls. Quick review indicates that the long beam from front to back is only supporting about 192 square feet of the second floor. 40 lb/ft live load would be about 7,600 pounds plus the dead load. Let's say the composite load is 100 lb/ft, then total load on the long beam would be around 20,000 lbs. It wouldn't take too big of a beam to take care of this.

No loss of lower level floor space due to supports. Conventional framing on the rest of the structure.

I am not an architect, or engineer, although I have had formal training in both arenas. I do however build multi million dollar buildings for a living and have produced working construction documents for several houses, including my own. I would be happy to give you a hand however I could.

 

[monkeyplasm]

Hello all and thanks again for all your input and suggestions.

I have attached a revised floorplan and switched to a gambrel roof to increase the second floor square footage. Sorry about the quality, I had to really drop the quality to get under the size limit for uploads.

The vehicles pictured are oversized to show the area they effectively take up (cars aren't really 8 feet wide). Stairs are 7.75" rise over 10" run.

I've redrawn the plan with the idea of using SocketSystems tip-up-frames along with steel beams to hold the second floor - should be plenty strong and the lower flange of the steel beams can be used with a trolly and chainfall to lift engines (mine are from 800# engine-only to 1400# with transmission and transfer case).

The only real dilemma with the general design right now is the 9'x18' wide garage door. Per the SocketSystems dude, I need a steel beam to act as a header board to hold up the middle tip-up-frame over the middle of the garage door. Yes, I could just use two 9'x9' wide garage doors instead (as SocketSystems dude pushed hard for), but (1) two garage doors and openers is more expensive than one garage door and opener, and (2) an 18' wide opening is much easier to manouver large objects through - e.g. dragging in my stricken off-road truck.

Anyone have some input on this (or any other) issue?

Obviously, I have been doing some research and looking very hard at SocketSystems. I spoke with them twice i the last two days. SocketSystems dude pushed very hard for 6" system instead of 8" system. Captain Overbuild (me - I overbuild everything) couldn't even get pricing out of him. Other than that he was quite pleasant and patient with my questions; his explanations were good and coherent for a layman like me.

One negative I got was that there sure seems to be a whole lot of really important information in the "Field Manual", which you don't get until you order your stuff. This information may not be really important to a knowledgeable builder. For to the do-it-yourself layman (first timer, like me), it is a major annoyance and a bitter pill to swallow that I have to take some things on faith/trust until the money is out of my hands. These unknowns really bother me. If not for the couple of you building their system as we speak and reporting good things, I would have walked away already. The feeling is like a general contractor saying "just trust me" while holding out his hand for substantial payment ahead of time.

The only other negative is that there is not enough specific dimensioning information to draw up a set of accurate plans to submit to the county building/codes man.

For just one example, how deep are the (gambrel in my case) elbows? I need to know so I can minimize the sidewall height above the second floor which also hangs from the sidewall posts. And, just as important, I can't draw accurate plans for the building/codes man unless I have this seemingly secret information.

The good news is that I found a local supplier who can get me the W16/31 steel beams delivered to my house for 25% less than SocketSystems can sell them before delivery. Of course I would then need to drill the mounting holes myself.

Don't take this as my banging on SocketSystems, just explaining my frustrations that could probably be eased with a little more information. I'll likely order from them, but I need to get some accurate plans drawn up. The plans issue is the last hurdle to digging some dirt and pouring some powdered rock.

How did any of you create your building plans for your SocketSystems building? What were the "bad" things or the "unfortunately unknown before hand so you couldn't avoid it until too late" things about using SocketSystems?

Again, thanks go out to everyone.
Toby in Nashville