Note that I said "usable" not "livable" -- we don't want to make it into a bedroom or something. ;) Here's the situation: I live in Southern California, in a 3-bedroom bungalow. Currently, one of our bedrooms is chock full of exercise equipment, and it's a little crowded in there. What we'd like to do is remodel our dark, spider-infested garage into a usable space for exercising, but that can be converted back into a normal garage after we're no longer living here. I'm open to suggestions or tips.

The garage right now is just bare studs, no insulation, with a geriatric garage door. The previous owner nailed in shelves against one wall, and various jerryrigged hanging components over head. As mentioned, there are monstrous spiders of the Shelob variety making their home in there. We mostly just use the garage to toss old boxes, and other odds and ends in.

What we'd like to do:

- put in a new garage door

- remove all the jerryrigged hanging components and handmade shelves

- put in some electrical wiring against the one wall (currently there is only one outlet in the entire garage) so we can put a tv in there to watch while we're exercising

- put in some overhead lights. There are none at all in the garage.

- put in insulation in the walls and ceiling

- put in drywall over walls and ceiling, and paint

- install some nice big cabinets with doors against the entire back wall for storage

- hang shelves against the one side of the garage

- workbench and tools storage on the other side of the garage

- put some sort of rubber tile flooring on the garage so it won't be too cold during winter

This should give us plenty of room for all our exercise equipment as well as storage space. I'm wondering if anyone has done anything like this before -- any pitfalls? Is there anything about this plan that jumps out at you as being problematic?

We plan on hiring someone to do the electrical, insulation, drywall, and garage door. We can probably do the rest ourselves.