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About This Project
Whether you’re rewiring or adding more wiring to an older garage, or running wires in a new garage, you have a decision to make. Do you plan to leave the walls open or close them up with drywall? If you intend to leave the walls and ceiling open, you have to follow the special rules that we show here. The same goes for sheds, workshops or other structures with unfinished walls outside the living space of the house.
In a house or a finished garage, electrical cable is protected from damage by permanent wall coverings like drywall, plaster or even wood, but that’s not the case in an unfinished garage. The key to safe, code-compliant exposed wiring is to use the framing members to protect and support the wires. That means not spanning stud or joist spaces with wires. Keep all the cables closely hugging the studs, plates and ceiling joists so they’re not subject to abuse (see “Dangerous Wiring Mistakes,” below).
In this story, we’ll show you a common, cost effective and code-approved way to run exposed electrical cable. But there’s one downside to this method: If you ever do decide to finish the area, you’ll have to completely rewire because the surface-mounted cables will make drywalling impossible.
In an unfinished garage, the trick is to follow the framing. Instead of connecting switch, light and outlet boxes by spanning framing spaces, route cable along studs, top plates and ceiling joists, along whichever framing member leads to the next box. That means you’ll use a lot more cable, because the paths are rarely direct. But cable’s cheap and quick to run. Keep all cables exposed and easy to see and never run cables on the tops of walls; keep them on vertical surfaces. That way the wires won’t ever have anything resting on them like hooks or garden tools.
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