Our Garage Remodel (part 1 of ∞)

So when we first moved into this house, we were presented with the issue of the unfinished garage. The previous owners put on new shingles so it wouldn’t leak, but aside from that it was in pretty bad shape, and still held piles of crap they had left behind. Additionally, while it has two doors on it, one of those doors was put in incorrectly, since the structure itself is in no way big enough for two cars. The rails for said door were all sorts of bent to make it fit, resulting in a door that rolls down into a space too small to fit and gets thoroughly wedged.

To be fair, we compounded the issue by seeing it as a future project, and thereby treating it as a pit in which to throw stuff, since we’d just clean it out “when we redo the garage”. And since we emptied the moving truck into the garage instead of the house when we first moved in, inertia kept even more junk in there.

At some point we decided it was time to jump in. “That’s it – this summer, we redo the garage!”, is I believe the phrase that started all this. Well this summer came and went, and as cooler weather approached we hit a sort of now-or-never scenario. In an effort to make it actually happen, we set a date and cleared our schedules. On September 10th, we were going to fix studs, insulate, and drywall the garage. Ha.
We’d been offered extra hands, and we happily called them in considering our suddenly shorter time-frame. In the week or so prior, with the help of my dad, Emma and I turned this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

into… well an empty garage. I totally forgot to take a picture of it when it was empty, and then the ‘hurricane that wasn’t’ came to town, and then it wasn’t empty anymore. Oh well.

The plan was to sister/replace the studs that needed it and leave the rest; and we pretty well stuck to the plan. This was a dumb plan, but more on that later.

The day went something like this: Emma, my dad, and I worked on the stud repairs while my cousin Steve and his portable home depot tool aisle framed a doorway into the partition wall in the back. No seriously, the guy’s got the right tool for just about everything. All day long the scenario replayed itself:
 
Person A: “Crap, I have to do something that there is an obscure purpose-built tool for, and without it the job is much more difficult, and/or frustrating.”
Steve: “Hold on a sec, I brought along said single-purpose tool. Let me go get it.”
 
I’m convinced that the doorframe he built (quite well, I might add) would’ve taken half the time if he didn’t have to stop and loan out nifty tools every 10 minutes.
By the end of the day, repetition had shortened that exchange to simply:
 
“Hey Steve – “
“It’s over there.”

It’s certainly true that everything would’ve taken longer if he hadn’t brought along his new toys.

No, no, no. The chocolate chip cookie and apple juice dispensers must be wired on independent circuits.

I simply cannot say enough good things about that impact driver.

Regardless, oblivious to our plan’s now-obvious-in-hindsight flaws, we marched on with approval from the forewoman, and once Emma finished her excellent wiring, we proceeded to the insulation.

We used Owens-Corning R-19 in rolls, and actually got into a decent rhythm of measure, cut, staple(with Steve’s Powershot staplegun), repeat. Nevertheless, after working all day, and with the room getting hotter (insulation will do that) we called it a day at about 8pm. Cleanup lasted a bit longer, but no more actual work got done after 8.

All in all, especially considering the sorry state of the thing to begin with, it was a very successful day. My mom made some delicious chili that I almost fell asleep face-first into, and everyone left to go to their respective beds. It wasn’t until well into the next day, when Emma and I attempted to put up the drywall that the holes in the logic of our plan would make themselves apparent.

Here are some End-Of-Day-One pictures: