Garage insulation

This year I decided to insulate the attic space above the garage. During the summer, the garage stays pretty hot and muggy, and nothing saps the will to work on projects in the garage more than stepping into a 40°C workspace.

The attic gets pretty toasty in the summer, and the drywall doesn’t do much to keep the heat out of the garage. I’m hoping the insulation will keep at least some of the hot humid attic air out of the garage and help maintain the garage at a tolerable temperature.

The insulation is pretty easy to put down, but having to crawl over and around the rafters made for tiring work, so I ended up splitting up the job over two days. Unfortunately I had a bit of a brain fart when ordering the insulation from Lowe’s and got the 16″ wide batts instead of the 24″ wide batts even though I had just measured the rafter spacing. Doh. Fortunately, each bat is 48″ long, so I just had to cut each one in half before laying it down. That added a bit to the installation process, but was easy enough to do.

With 4 of the 8 packs of insulation down, all the far away parts of the garage were insulated.

At the far end of the garage, there’s not a lot of head room and lots of shingle nails poking through the roof sheathing. After laying a few pieces of insulation down, I decided my head needed some protection. I don’t have a hard hat but I do have a bike helmet, which proved to be adequate for the job.

The second day went a lot faster and I was able to get the rest of it done in about an hour. A little less crouching and crawling around because most of the hard to get areas were already done.

The opening to the attic area is the only space left uninsulated now, so I’ll have to think of something to do about  that. Maybe glue some insulation to a board that would sit on the opening and could be moved out of the way when needed.

Ended up only using about 6.5 bundles out of the 8 that I bought. Not sure what I’ll do with the leftovers. Maybe I’ll just spread them out over the attic.