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Have you ever noticed that almost every newly built home has a garage that looks like this? Why do most home builders leave garages unfinished and unpainted?
When we bought our first single-family home with a garage, I was super pumped. I immediately wanted to paint the garage so I didn’t have to look at that ugly brown sheet rock or drywall with those white stripes and marks all over it. I thought, I’m going to paint this thing. This is going to look way better. I’ll be able to work out here. Some of my neighbors immediately said, “Don’t do it, if you do that, they’re going to raise your taxes. You’re going to have to pay more. It’s not worth it.” So I never did. Another thing I started noticing was that not only were a lot of these garages not painted or finished, but the finish that was on the drywall is what’s called a Level One or Level Two drywall finish.
That means that at that lower level, they’re putting up the drywall. They screw it all in, and then they use a single layer of mud and tape over the joints, and then a quick and dirty layer basically over the screws, just to cover them up so you won’t see any screws. We’ll talk more about why they go just to that specific level, but that has a great impact on your ability to actually paint it later. At this level of one or two, there are no extra coats of mud, so not a second or a third coat. There’s usually not any sort of texture on there, and it’s just not ready for paint.
I recently drove through a brand-new neighborhood that was just being finished up. It was full of million-dollar homes, and a lot of the garage doors were open. I was snooping around, taking a peek in all of the garages. I’m always curious about this sort of thing. And guess what? They all had the same garages as I did. They had that level one or two finished drywall, and nothing else. There was no paint, no finish, and it did not look good. That leads me to believe this can’t be a cost issue. When you’re building a million-dollar home, surely you’re not going to skip the little bit of money that it costs to finish off a garage.
I decided to hop online and see what I could find out about this topic. And it was kind of tough to find answers specifically to this.
A lot of forums had some pretty interesting suggestions. Here are some of the things that the good folks of the old intro webs had to say:
– My father always told me that a dry-walled garage adds to your property taxes.
– Garages are left unfinished because people do so many different things with their garages, especially from a storage standpoint.
– I guess that they are just meeting the Fire Code.
– Drywall is not a great wall material for a garage. It’s too fragile and fussy.
– Paint it once, and you have to repaint it when it peels. Leave it alone, and it never needs maintenance. It’s a Zen thing.
– As far as taxes, the folks from City Hall came by this summer and asked if I had finished my garage or completed any other upgrades. The garage was not finished at this time. This means the next tax assessment won’t be for many years to come.
– Unless someone asks for pay, the only requirement for builders is to have a one-hour separation, and they’re referring to fire separation between the garage and living space. This is achieved with one layer of type X gypsum board, fire taped on the garage side. Anything beyond that is money out of developer’s or builder’s pocket.
– For an additional amount, you can get finished walls in your garage. Most buyers prefer to spend their money elsewhere.
I decided to reach out to some home builders in our area to see what they had to say about this. So I started by reaching out to a friend of mine who represents a home builder that does huge homes, typically 400,000 to $900,000 range, and asked what he had to say about it. And he said, and I quote, we don’t offer that. That’s it. Okay. So apparently it’s not even enough of a concern of theirs to even bother offering it, regardless of what someone wants.
I reached out to a second home builder, and they said it typically costs an additional four to $7,000 to paint and finish a two-car garage, and most home builders don’t want to deal with that, or the buyers specifically don’t want to pay for it.
A third builder told me the following, “It’s purely budgetary. You find most volume builders do a level one finish. This is the minimum to meet fire code. When you look at recommended specs from drywall manufacturers, they all recommend at least a primer coat on the surface. However, it’s not to code, at least not in Utah. Some other places outside of Utah, where the humidity is higher, require all drywall surfaces to be coated.” So, by all accounts from those in the know, it does seem to come down to cost. Not a big surprise there.
So what about the tax thing, though? Is there any truth to that? If I paint my garage, is it going to cost more? I called my city office and talked to the building department. They said, “If you paint your garage, you don’t need to pull a permit for that, so technically, nothing’s going to be assessed, and therefore you won’t have raised taxes on that.” But that still didn’t answer my question. I wanted to find out if you have three different homes, for example, they’re identical in every way except for the garage. And in one garage, let’s say. House A, you’ve just got studs and no drywall. In house B, you’ve got the drywall, and it’s to a level one drywall finish like we’ve been talking about. And in house C, it’s finished to a level three and it’s painted. Are they going to cost anything different from one to the other in taxes?
I called up our county assessor to find out the answer to this question, and here’s what they had to say. “They’ll probably happen by default, because when we usually inspect a house that’s under construction, and we see a garage, once it’s finished, we don’t see the inside of the garage. We won’t even know the difference. Every five years, we do a re-inspection of every property, but it’s only done from the exterior. All we look at is to see if there’s some obvious conditional issues, or if it’s been added onto, or maybe it’s been recited or something. Most of our judgment is based on what we can see from the street.
Out of curiosity, I polled my YouTube viewers to find out what you guys have in your garages. And I gotta say, I was pretty surprised. Over 4000 of you have voted, and currently, 20% say they are framed, but there’s no drywall in the garage. 27% says it’s drywalled and not painted, kind of like what we talked about and what builders typically are doing. And then an overwhelming 43% say they’re finished and painted by them, in this case, we’re referring to the garage walls. 10% say they’re OSB plywood or other. I was surprised by that 43%, and reading through the comments, I started to realize so many people are just doing this themselves.
A lot of times, the builder is going to leave the garage either without drywall at all, just framed, or they’re going to do that level one drywall, finish on it, and not finish it any further, or paint it. And then the homeowner, whether that first homeowner or someone later down the road, goes in and paints it back. One of my good buddies just down the street painted his garage for the first time. They didn’t do the ceiling, but they did the walls because they said it was ugly. And they thought this was not expensive to paint. So they did that right over the level one finish.
I’ve been told different things, one is that because it doesn’t have the multiple coats of mud on it, the tape is going to start to peel and crack, and come up. It’s something you would want to look at. Ideally, you should put at least another coat or two of drywall mud and then get that looking nice and finished, and prepped for paint. The other thing I have to take into account with this particular poll is that the people who subscribe to my channel are DIY ers. That’s what this channel is all about. These people are weekend warriors, and they’re in their garages, building things, fixing things, and getting stuff done. So their garage space becomes a lot more important than it would for someone who’s maybe not very handy or not into doing any DIY projects. So I probably have some skewed numbers versus the general population, because you guys are handy and are DIY ers.
Why do builders finish the garage this way? Because it’s cheaper, and it saves them money. It all comes down to money. No big surprise there. As far as taxes, like we saw, it does have an impact on that. That’s something to take into consideration when you’re considering painting your walls. Then, when it gets assessed, it may cause you to have higher tax rates.
Speaking of DIY ing in the garage, I’m in the process of renovating my garage. I’ve ripped out all of the sheet rock with the level one drywall finish, and I’ve added new electrical run, new audio cables, I’ve insulated it, run some resilient channel, put OSB on top of that, and then I’m gonna finish that off with a new product called trust core. I’ll talk all about that in some future videos. When I show that install process, it’s pretty cool. I’m going all out, because this needs to be my studio where I record these videos, as well as a wood shop, and it needs to be easily cleaned and well lit. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you want to learn more about how that’s going and keep up with the progress on that.
Since we are all about garages today, check out this post on Unique Ways to Transform Your Home Garage. Click HERE for all of the details.
I’ll give you all the tips and tricks you need to know to renovate your garage. Check out this post on Common Mistakes People Make When Renovating Their Garages. Click HERE for info.