Howard Ferstler

This room has an interesting history. At first, it was a photo darkroom (color printing and black and white) and all that was involved was an insulated wall separating it from the garage area and full integration to the home's heat and AC systems. The room was fully plumbed, and even had a small water heater.

Building the room made it impossible for the garage to hold any vehicles longer than 180 inches. Since the wife and I like econocars, this was no problem. Yes, we are people who think that garages are for cars and not for holding deteriorating junk.

Once I got out of doing lots of photography I converted the room to a storage room, which allowed my wife and I to turn our regular interior closets into, well, closets for clothes, as they should be.

The store room is 22 feet long and 5.5 feet wide. The wall to the right (facing the garage) initially was drywall over 2x4 studs, with R-11 insulation (typical fill for North Florida). The current wall has additional paneling over R-3 foam sheets that are themselves over the drywall. The result is an R-14 wall.

The wall to the left was also R-11 insulated, but to hide the exposed concrete-block footers in the store room I added another 2x4 layer of studs, this time with R-13 insulation, giving us R-24. The wall at the end was done the same way.

The ceiling has paneling over the original drywall, with the attic area above R-19. AC/heat vents are in the ceiling. Down at the far end is a work bench for doing all sorts of minor-scale operations.

The floor has a grid made of 2x6 timber underneath, raising the level uip to that of the house entrance (from where the photo was taken). Fiberglass fill is in the grid area, with plywood flooring and vinyl finishing up. The grid area under the flooring is also sprinkled with a liberal amount of Borax powder to discourage bug infestation.

This room has been a godsend, because it allows us to have a single space to store useful items and frees up our closets to hold clothing.

Howard Ferstler

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