With winter coming and so many people working from home due to the pandemic, I wanted to share this project of mine from 2015
Back in November 2015, I had a problem. I was working from home until construction finished on the new Oregon City office, and the only available space quiet enough for me to conduct my training webinars was our garage.
The space had worked OK when I started using it in October, but in November the temperatures in the garage were regularly colder than our refrigerator, and I knew it was only going to get worse. I had a little electric space heater, but it used a lot of electricity and all it really did was warm my feet.
Rather than buy a bigger heater, what I wanted to do was make the area that needed to be heated smaller. So I started searching the internet for simple, inexpensive ways to do that without requiring carpentry, drywall, or anything else that the landlord would have to approve first. But I searched in vain.
When my online search yielded no solutions, I decided to come up with my own. And the result remains one of my proudest moments of ingenuity.
The final result essentially consisted of three types of components:
3 sets of 6’ high metal shelves from Target (2 sets 4’ wide, and 1 set 3’ wide set)
10’x25’ sheet of 3.5 mil plastic sheeting (a.k.a. painters plastic)
Lots and lots of zip ties
The most complex aspect of the setup was the configuration of the shelving units. If you’re planning to do this yourself, I highly suggest using the configuration in the photo below (which was the result of lots of trial and error.) This ended up providing me with a 7’x7’ area that was 6 feet high and gave me a 3’ doorway.
The next step was attaching the painters plastic to the inside area, which I did by poking small holes in the plastic sheeting wherever I wanted to anchor it to a pole or shelf. I suggest using a lot of anchor points, and starting from one wall and moving along until getting to the doorway area.
The reasons I suggest attaching the plastic to the inside area are because A) it means less air that needs to be heated in the workspace and B) it means the shelves can still be used for storage on the outside.
For the doorway, I cut a 3’x6’ piece of plastic sheeting, and then cut it in half to make two sheets 1.5’x6’ and hung those from the top of the doorway using zip ties.
I finished up by cutting a 7.5’x7.5’ sheet of plastic for the “ceiling” of my workspace. I attached this to the top of my two “shelf walls” with more zip ties, and attached it to the two garage walls using screws and metal washers. The metal washers help prevent the plastic from just tearing itself off the screws. (Though when I ran out of washers, I found just poking the screw through a milk jug cap worked just as well.)
A few side notes:
If you find yourself needing to cut the plastic and joining multiple pieces, don’t sweat it. Regular mailing tape works great and sticks firm. It’s not quite as pretty as one continuous sheet, but still totally functional.
At first I found that the ceiling drooped down a bit and I went through all kinds of complicated attempts to raise it up, but that turned out to be unnecessary. After using the workspace for a day, I realized that simply having my space heater on inside caused the whole space to inflate like a balloon pretty quickly. In warmer weather when I didn’t need the heater, I put a box fan by the door that blew air in from outside the space, and that was even more effective.
Don’t worry about sealing everything up perfectly. You want some amount of air passing the barrier so you can, y’know, breath. A bit of air leaking in or out won’t make a huge difference in terms of heating the space.
Alright, I hope this might turn out to be useful for somebody reading this. Stay safe, and if you end up using this idea, I’d love to see photos of your result!!
