The Garage Project

Sure an A-frame is pretty convenient when it comes to snow storms. The snow slides right down the roof. And last year a friend's home suffered severe hail damage (and our hostas looked like someone had shot them with a BB gun) but the A-frame? Not a scratch.

But why build a house suited to wintry weather and not build a garage to go along with it? That was my husband's question and number one on his renovations list. I would have preferred a nice master bedroom and bath but hey, you've got to compromise sometimes.

Here is a shot of the team ripping up our lovely new yard. I have to admit that was hard to watch. The foundation was the most expensive and time consuming part of the project. We hired a small team who did a fine job but they just took a loooooong time to do it. I'm talking months. Days would go by when I wouldn't see any of them. Much of the delay had to do with two things:
1. the amount of ledge and rocks in our yard
2. the main contractor's lousy truck that kept breaking down on him. I once offered to go pick him up and bring him to our house just to get the project moving along

The rocks in our yard were so large that we couldn't even haul them out. They now make a nice seating area behind the garage where we keep our fire pit. I'll post pictures of that someday. We had to do a lot of foundation work ourselves, which was a real kicker. My husband rented a skid steer and pushed in all the fill. This was not much fun considering we had to have the dumptruck that brought the fill tow him out a couple times. Here is my son spraying water on the fill.

We hired a team from Maine to build the garage. They had it up in two and a half days. It was amazing.

Next the electrician came and wired up the garage. To save costs my huband did more work himself by digging a trench around our patio that would contain the electrical wiring from the house. The picture below is our patio, which I love, and which sits between the house and the garage. He had to dig a trench around the stone and through the mulch section. The garage is on the left side of the picture, out of view.

We painted the garage ourselves and four weeks later our custom garage doors were installed. It was a very exciting project and I think it came out pretty good. We'd like to upgrade the siding in the future but for now it makes a cozy spot to store our cars and a fanastic storage space (because our house has none).