Mazdeuce fixes the grosh

When my wife and I bought our house almost 13 years ago one of the biggest selling points for me was the big detached garage. It was full of junk, but it had potential. There was just so much room and the slab was solid and think of all the things I could do! Over the first few years I cleaned it out, bought a rally car completely disassembled and put it together. The day I moved the rally car out, I moved a potential challenge car in and took it apart. Then my second baby was born and.......things stopped. Well, work stopped, decay continued.
Yesterday the last of my four kids started school full time. I have about 6.5 hours a day to work on whatever I please as long as I keep up with the stuff I really should do around the house, and the yard, and the shopping, and the cooking, and taking kids to the doctor/dentist and stopping by to have lunch with my wife and maintaining all five of the cars and volunteering to teach literacy at the elementary school a couple of days a week. Tons of free time.
For now, I'm going to let pictures tell the sad story of the building. As I tear things apart and start to rebuild, I'll go into the plans and such.

There's a challenge car in there. Ran when parked!

Motorcycles.

Junk. There's a car under there. I have a problem.

Ouch.

Ok... now I understand why you don't want to buy the Fubaru right now...

If it makes you feel any better, 13 years ago the house and the garage were in pretty much the same condition. I've been actively working on the house while neglecting the garage and the house is quite a nice place to raise a family now. My wife has enough confidence in me that she suggested that I buy the Fubaru and put it in storage until I have the room at home. I can do this. Nothing in the pictures is insurmountable, it's just a matter of time and effort. It helps that I live in an area without building codes or permits.

So when does the Fubaru arrive?

Manufactured roof trusses and a 16' (?) roll-up door oughta fix that.

good lord...good luck!

But, as someone who just cleaned up/remodeled an entire house after The Attack of the Live-in Hoarder [queue scary sound effect] Reee Reeee Reeee with her piles of stuff and lackadaisical housekeeping and pet maintenance routines, I agree with you... time and effort will go much farther than dollar bills will in this project. Dont get me wrong, youre gonna need a lot of dollar bills too , but elbow grease will have a huge impact as well!

EDIT: Crud, I did that thing where the tone of my message sounds like A) I'm telling you what to do, and B) sounds like I failed to note that you just did all this to the house and know what you're dealing with... Sorry about that; it wasn't the intent.

mazdeuce wrote: Nothing in the pictures is insurmountable, it's just a matter of time and effort.

That looks slightly worse than our garage, in particular the roof area. Similar damage, ours didn't have quite so many open holes.

mazdeuce wrote: It helps that I live in an area without building codes or permits.

If I hadn't had codes/permits to deal with, razing and starting anew would have been very compelling. In my case, I would have had to move the garage 5' north and 5' east, and because of the small area, that would have meant shrinking it, which would have made it useless.

There's a lot I can't tell from the pictures, and an even larger dose of I-don't-know-all-that-much-really, but I'd probably pencil out the idea of starting over.

There are many areas of a building which are a much bigger pain to repair than to install. Trying to find a place to put yourself while partially dismantling a rotten roof is awkward and a little scary.

Plus you could give it a barn-style roof or just a proper second story for storage...

ransom wrote: If I hadn't had codes/permits to deal with, razing and starting anew would have been very compelling. There are many areas of a building which are a much bigger pain to repair than to install. Trying to find a place to put yourself while partially dismantling a rotten roof is awkward and a little scary. Plus you could give it a barn-style roof or just a proper second story for storage...

This is pretty close to the plan. The back section is 6 inch thick reinforced concrete 8' up. The front has a half wall on one side and a scabbed together wall on the other. The whole front where the door is is just scabbed together junk. All of the "trusses" are old concrete form wood that is semi haphazardly put together. Other than the concrete, not much is staying. Literally tearing it down to a bare slab/walls would be ideal but it presents some logistical problems. In the end there will be a lift. There will be at least one power garage door so my wife can park the 911 inside. There will be a small upstairs office/inlaw bedroom so my wife can work at home without the distraction of the kids/me and my inlaws can sleep with some level of peace. Also, there are two toilet rings in the floor and the plumbing that connects to our current septic. Our house only has one bathroom, so a second one will be appreciated, even if you have to go next door to use it.

For some reason, I love home projects where nothing you do could make it worse. Godspeed, mazdeuce!

I like where this is going.

Because it clearly has noplace to go but up :)

What a mess! Looks like a lot of fun, though.

Four more posts, Mazdeuce....

irish44j wrote: I like where this is going. Because it clearly has noplace to go but up :)

That's a dangerous statement.

My oldest daughter is now old enough that grooming is her favorite past time. I'm starting to think installing the toilet in the garage should be higher on my list. You can poop without a roof, right?

Dropping a toilet on an exisiting slab sounds like a pain to me.

Sub'ed (well I would if the forum had one)

also, if you haven't been to garage journal then you really should check it out. Lots of good ideas there.

Behold, the toilet ring! There are actually two of them in the floor plumbed into my current septic. The other one is under a 2.5 tall block, so it's harder to photograph. The in slab plumbing is probably the best part about the building at this point. Garage journal is a dangerous place. A man could lose his fortune hanging out in a place like that.

A man could lose his fortune hanging out in a place like that.

Truer words have not been spoken. Though check out Jack Olsen's "12 gauge garage" it's got lots of good ideas for cheap and in a small space. I think there are better examples out there, but Jack does a great job of documenting his.

tpwalsh wrote: Sub'ed (well I would if the forum had one)

Psst; tap the "heart" under the reply box!

Some dimensions. These are mostly for me to refer to later when I forget them.
The building is 49x24. 1176 square feet.
My wife's FJ cruiser is just shy of 7 feet tall, but there is also nearly a foot of clearance under most of the truck. That means that if I could lift it five feet in the air then I could walk under it and only hit my head some of the time. I need 12 feet of overhead space where the lift will go. This works out quite well, because half of the front part of the building (the front 28 feet) has a concrete half wall that is four feet high. If I build a standard 8 foot wall on top of this then I'll be good, and I can build a 12 foot wall on the other side where the guy who built it never got around to finishing the half wall. I'm thinking of a four post lift, and those look like they're 10 feet wide or so.
Half of the front of the garage, so 12 x 28 feet will be the work bay. The other 12x28 will be parking for my wife with a loft/office above it. The back part of the garage, 24x21, also has an 8 foot wide door in it so I can move things like lawn mowers and go karts and bicycles in and out without having to intrude on the car workspace in the front.
I should draw a picture.

My big-ass detached had a bathroom built in when I took possession. Also, a sh1t-ton of old particle board kitchen upper and lower cabinets and laminate countertop along the back and down one side.

All of which was home to approximately 2.2 billion camel crickets.

After firing off a bunch of bug bombs and sweeping out 2.2 billion dead camel crickets, I removed everything. The former garage toilet drain connects to the the main soil stack in the basement.

It will be easy to disconnect it and use it as a chase to pull a natural gas line from the house when I instulate and drywall and install an HVAC system eventually.

Slightly OT, but related to some of the content in the first post...

I just posted this in "can we stop hotlinking", but after reading this thread I thought Mazdeuce would appreciate it.

On his cartoon blog Zen Pencils, Gavin Aung Than turns inspirational quotes into comic strips. For his newest strip, he illustrated a quote from Bill Watterson’s 1990 speech at Kenyon College in the style of Calvin and Hobbes, which Than considers “the greatest comic strip of all time.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/27/bill_watterson_s_cartoonist_s_advice_in_comic_form_by_zen_pencils_aka_gavin.html

In reply to Matt B:

Thank you for that.

Matt, that was AWESOME!

Calvin and Hobbes is my personal favorite, and those morals align 100% with mine.

Thanks!

There are certainly worse ways to live ones life.

I will admit to being somewhat envious.