Building a Wall

I had decided that the best place for me to grow a lot of microgreens was going to be in my garage. I have a 3 car garage and only 2 vehicles so I could rearrange, organize and fit everything in the larger part leave a full car bay to grow. Unfortunately I live in AZ, and my garage gets to about 115 degrees in the summer, so I would need to air condition it. Cooling an uninsulated 3-car garage would be very costly so I needed to build a wall. I did a lot of researching and learned the basics of building a wall in the garage.

I bought a bunch of lumber and got to work. My 79 father was kind enough to help me frame the wall out. He is an amazing engineer and has built many structures. I had

researched attaching the wall to the foundation using lag bolts but he insisted on using a new toy he bought which shoots a nail through the cement using a .22. When I complained that it would be way too loud shooting a .22 in a closed garage, he handed me a pair of ear protection. Today's generation will never understand the relationship between a boomer parent and and a Gen X kid! Needless to say we made short work of attaching the pressure-treated lumber to the concrete floor.

Attaching the top plate was harder than I anticipated. The location where I wanted the wall did not have a rafter directly above it so I have nothing solid to attach it to. Again my dad stepped in and explained how to construct a double top plate and attached at the sides. After getting that up, putting up the studs 16 inches apart was fairly easy using a pneumatic framing gun.

Unfortunately at this point I had to pause again. I didn't have any electrical outlets on that side of the garage and I was going to need a lot of power for the AC, lights, and fans. I would need to add at least 1 circuit. Electricity is something I'm not comfortable working with so I decided to call in an electrician. I had the electrician rough in 2 new circuits and install 20 amp breakers on them. One would be a dedicated circuits for the AC with only 1 GFI outlet. The other circuit would have 1 GFI outlet and 4 basic outlets for the lights.