Garage Door Music!

A garage can be turned into nearly anything. The space in your garage is often one of the bigger rooms in your house and the sheer uninhibited size is one of the most easily usable things about the room. It can be turned into a bedroom, a den, an extra living room, workspace and more extremely easily and then converted back to a car storage room with little to no construction necessary. In face the garage door opening allows you to easily bring furniture you would otherwise not be able to fit into some houses in easily and quickly. You may be thinking then what you should do with your garage once all apple and google take over the auto industry and we have autonomous vehicles driving us everywhere. With what we’ve said so far it seems that there is no shortage of things that your garage can be turned into without much trouble at all. What if then you want to really go all in on one of your big interests with this newfound room or just convert your garage halfway into a room for your hobbies with the other half still housing cars. Regardless of how or why you are doing it we are going to investigate one interest in particular and how well your garage might be suited for it. That interest is, music.

For many the garage is like a fortress of solitude, a place where one or two family members really get to call their own. Homes generally take on different senses of ownership as they go and the garage is no different. Turning your garage into a music or audio den is a great idea for some and not so great of an idea for others. As is usually the case which category you fall under depends on your individual situation a fair bit. Whether you are an audiophile with a huge catalog or just someone who enjoys rocking out to some tunes on the radio or the phone, your experience with a garage music den will vary. Then of course there are also the garage rockers that provide their own music, which fits them in a whole new category altogether. With these three categories we will look at whether a garage set up is really advantageous or if another room might be more well suited for your hobbies.

The audiophile would get a pretty short answer if they were to ask themselves if they should hole up in the garage with their music. That answer would be no. For audiophiles the garage really only has two advantages and those are the material that is most likely used for the building of the garage and the general emptiness of the garage as a whole. The cement will work well to deaden a lot of the sound and is easier to adapt to acoustically, but other than that there are nearly no benefits to having your “audio den” in the garage. To start the garage makes a pretty bad place for your audio den because of all the equipment that is associated with it. Stereos, speakers and vinyl records are the building blocks of a great listening environment and garages are simply not equipped to store those types of things. However great your garage door may be, whether it’s incredibly well insulated and never opened or if it’s simply your run of the mill wooden garage door, moisture and outside air are bound to leak in. Records and finely tuned speakers will not stand up to changing temperatures and humidity well and you will end up spending more time on your systems settings than you will on actually listening to music. On top of all of that if your garage door is improperly installed or gets damaged in a storm you could very well end up losing a great deal of expensive equipment and some rare records in the floods because of a bad storm or garage door. For most audio and music buffs listening to their music loud and crystal clear is their number one priority. This isn’t really possible unless you have the best insulation in your garage door that there is, which will allow you to crank up the volume a great deal before you start getting complaints. The garage then doesn’t make a great place for your serious audio engineer level guys. Others may see things differently. Where the failings of the garage door may make some choose the basement or another room as their listening room, these things may make others think of the garage as the perfect spot.

It is true that a garage is one of the most versatile rooms in the house, but it seems that for many who really want to delve into sound equipment and music the garage is not the place to do it. Concrete walls and floors may have their acoustic benefits, but otherwise the garage is a minefield of problems for sound lovers. Your vinyl could get ruined, your speakers could get ruined and you could even upset the neighbors. In order to do things right in your garage you would need an incredibly well installed garage door that could keep out humidity and keep in sound all while making sure that no storms break through the seal. While possible it is really not worth the cost for that type of garage door when another room in your house would most likely be much better equipped for the task. If you are hoping to turn a room into your audiophile’s paradise then you will want to bypass the garage, but for other musical pursuits it may just be the perfect fit. In our next post we will look at a few of the other ways to use your garage to its fullest once you have run out of cars to put in it. You will be amazed at the many things that your garage may just be the perfect room for, so stop on by and tell us your garage ideas if you have them.