You should hire a licensed structural or civil engineer to advise on your retrofit efforts.
Living above garage fumes.
Are the fumes from the cars in the garage dangerous.
And if they are.
Toxic fumes and gases from your attached garage can find their way into your living space and pollute indoor air.
Cars mowers paints and lubricants contain or generate toxic substances that can enter your home through open doors gaps around closed doors ducts and other wall and ceiling penetrations.
Q we live in a two story home with an attached two car garage.
Install a 20 minute fire rated door between the garage and the inside.
Never had any particular issues with the rooms being too cold or fumes or anything else.
The half life of co at 100 o2 at sea level is 80 min.
Above the garage is our master bedroom.
Fire and building codes exist for good reason.
Garage apartments often get added to an already existing garage that was not originally designed as a living space.
The small penetrations in the walls between the garage and the living spaces could add up and over time lead to lots of harmful fumes drifting into the home.
Cea encourages owners of older pre 1980 houses in other words houses that are more vulnerable to earthquakes to retrofit their houses to strengthen them against earthquake damage.
For more ways to create private space in a home see our collection of house plans with inlaw suites.
Aside from stopping fumes you need to make sure that a fire starting in the garage can t spread to the inside of the home.
Converting a garage into a habitable living space is a construction project that s bound by numerous regulations and building codes.
A garage apartment is as safe to live in as any other apartment as long as it gets built to code.
To obtain a building.
Garage conversion building regulations.
This case is notable because after 8 to10 h of breathing exhaust fumes in a closed garage the patient s hbco level was only 4 8.
Using extrapolation this patient s hbco level at the scene would have been 10 well below the toxic level of 20.
The door between the garage and the living space was usually made of wood and lacked weather stripping or a self closing device to block the exhaust fumes.
Adequately preparing a living space over a garage requires an engineered retrofit.
