House in the planning / financing stages
The garage and a store room (will become a shop someday) are seperated from the rest of the house by exterior walls and a breezeway, and are connected to the rest of the house by a common roof and foundation.
The breezeway is open at the two ends and provides about 10 foot of seperation between the garge / storeroom and the rest of the house.
Does the store room need to have the dry wall installed to meet code? 2003 IRC
I’ve searched through the code book a couple of times and haven’t come up with a good answer.
Replies
Without looking it up I'd venture an educated guess that the garage and storeroom would need to be separated from the living space attic by drywall meaning that the ceilings of the 2 unheated areas would need to be sheetrocked. An alternative might be a sheetrock firewall in the attic of the breezeway. This might be as simple as sheetrocking one side of a truss. Really though, if you can't find it in your code book, you would be best to check with your local inspectors, because even if it is not required by code the local building department may require it.
Also, we don't use IRC 2003 - we use IRC 2000. IRC 2003 (with modifications) has been held up in the state legislature by politicians for a year now.
There is no doubt that the local inspector will have the final say.
I guess I had never considered the possiblity that somebody would build something like this without a firestop at both the house and garage end of the breezeway. I will make sure that it does show up in the plans and that it is built that way regardless.
So, I guess the insinuation is that wheather a non living space area (surface) needs to drywalled is all to do with firestopping. When/if you find it in your code book, let me know. I'm interested, and although we use IRC2000 (for now) I'm sure the chapters are all layed out the same, etc.