Expert Painters

New Year Garage Project: Gym, Workshop or Home Office

27 Oct

The garage is the most common January project in Melbourne, and the most commonly botched. A gym, a workshop, a home office or somewhere for the kids to make noise, all of it starts with making the space feel like a room rather than a garage.

The mistake is painting it like a bedroom. A garage is not an interior room, and a standard interior paint system on bare masonry will not last a winter.

Why garage walls fail when painted like a room

Most Melbourne garages are unlined brick, block or besser, with an uninsulated roof and a slab poured directly on ground. That combination produces conditions no bedroom wall deals with:

  • Moisture rising through the slab and the base of the walls, because there is often no damp-proof course where you would want one
  • Condensation on cold masonry through winter, as warm moist air from a gym or a dryer hits a cold wall
  • Large temperature swings, from very hot under an uninsulated roof in February to near-outdoor cold in July
  • Water entry at the slab edge, under the roller door, and at the roof junction

An interior acrylic applied straight onto that will blister and lift within months. It is not a product quality problem. It is a moisture problem that was painted over.

Deal with the water before anything else

Walk the garage after heavy rain and look for:

  • Damp patches or a tide line along the base of the walls
  • White crystalline deposits or powdery render, which indicate moisture moving through the masonry and depositing salts. Our post on efflorescence explains what it means
  • Water tracking in under the roller door, which is usually a threshold or drainage issue rather than a sealing one
  • Staining on the underside of the roof sheets or around the roof junction
  • Mould in the corners and behind anything stored against a wall

All of that gets fixed first. Paint applied over active moisture fails, and sealing a damp masonry wall with a waterproof coating makes it worse by trapping the moisture inside the wall.

Bare masonry, or line it first

There are two legitimate approaches and they suit different uses.

Painting bare masonry is the cheap, sensible option for a workshop, a gym or storage. It needs cleaning and degreasing, repair of any damaged mortar, then a masonry sealer followed by a vapour-permeable masonry paint that lets the wall dry outwards. Done properly it looks clean, brightens the space enormously and lasts.

Lining the walls with plasterboard gives you a proper room, with the chance to insulate and run power at the same time. It costs considerably more and it changes the painting job into a standard interior one, which we cover in painting new plasterboard. If you line a garage without insulating and without dealing with the moisture first, you have simply hidden the problem behind a sheet that will go mouldy.

One thing worth checking before you commit. Converting a garage into a habitable room, somewhere you sleep or work in full time, is a building matter rather than a decorating one, and councils have requirements around ventilation, natural light, egress and in some cases retained on-site parking. It can also affect your insurance. A gym or workshop is usually fine; a bedroom or a permanent office is worth a call to your council first.

Light is the thing that makes it feel finished

Garages have almost no natural light, often one window and a roller door, and lighting is usually a couple of battens.

That makes colour choice more functional than aesthetic. Go light and reflective: a white or near-white ceiling and pale walls will do more for the usability of the space than any amount of extra lighting, because every surface becomes a reflector. A dark feature wall in a garage looks striking in a photograph and makes the room unusable at night.

Paint the underside of the roof and the rafters as well if they are exposed. It is the largest surface in the room, it is usually filthy, and leaving it while painting the walls makes the finished space look half done.

The floor is a separate decision, and it goes last

Floor coatings are their own job with their own preparation, and the order matters: walls and ceiling first, floor last. Coating the floor before the walls means drips, overspray and scuffing on a finish you have just paid for.

A garage floor also needs genuine preparation, usually grinding, and a moisture reading before a system is chosen. Our guide to garage floor epoxy in Melbourne covers why the cheap kits lift and what a proper system involves.

Order of work

  • Clear the garage completely, and clean and degrease the walls and floor
  • Fix water entry, drainage and any moisture source
  • Repair damaged mortar, render and masonry, and let repairs dry
  • Line and insulate, if that is the chosen route
  • Seal and paint the ceiling or roof underside
  • Paint the walls
  • Paint the door frames, the access door and the inside of the roller door
  • Coat the floor last

The step people skip is the first one, and it is why so many garage repaints look good in February and poor by August.

What we do in garages

  • Cleaning, degreasing and masonry preparation
  • Moisture and salt damp assessment before any coating goes on
  • Sealing and painting of bare brick, block and besser walls
  • Ceilings, exposed rafters and roof undersides
  • Plasterboard-lined conversions, prepared and finished
  • Door frames, access doors and roller door interiors
  • Floor coating as part of the same project

We are based in Richmond and work across Melbourne and the bayside suburbs.

Call 0404 330 332 and tell us what the space is going to be used for. The use determines the system, and that is the part worth getting right once.

šŸ“ Our Service Areas Across Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula, Surf Coast & Phillip Island

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