House report 31: Garage - before, after and after!

The garage project is well under way! And it has been a doozy so far.

It started with Jeff building a whole new attic in the garage to take advantage of oodles of rafter space. I thought it seemed like a whole lot of effort we didn't need to make, but it has paid dividends in extra storage space. All the camping equipment and holiday decorations are now safely stored in the garage attic and not the garage.

The laundry area was next. It was an awful place to do laundry - dark and nasty with mouldy old broken drywall. The water softener wasn't plumbed in properly so every night when it ran it would leave a big puddle on the garage floor, so you couldn't ever leave any laundry out overnight because it would get wet and have to be re-washed. The air conditioner (which ran non-stop from July to Thanksgiving) wasn't plumbed in and so twice a day we would have to empty out the five gallon bucket before it overflowed and flooded the garage.

Before

So the plan was to replumb it all and make it work. First up, Jeff opened up the rest of the wall and found a pipe that had clearly been leaking. So he cut off the stained part to repair the rest of the pipe... at which point the pipe fell out of the wall. It was not attached to anything! So after some experiments pouring water down various drains upstairs we discovered that it was the pipe to the sink in the master bedroom. Which we have been using quite happily for the last year. All that water was just pouring down into the walls!

Once we had that sorted out it was time to put in new gas lines and plumb in the air conditioner. I was so excited by this, we were all quite tired of the five gallon bucket! So Jeff worked for a couple of weekends in that corner (which meant no laundry for about three weeks) and then announced that it was all done. We were all about to run out of clothes, so I did a massive load of laundry and waited for the tumble dryer to go back in. And when it did, it didn't work!! Disaster. Jeff was quite grumbly about it.

He went off to work the next day and called our friend Bill to come over and take a look. After some investigating Bill said that there was nothing wrong with the dryer, but that no gas was getting to it (through the brand new gas line). It was a mystery. And after about an hour of trying to figure it out, we took an executive decision and opened up the brand new, textured and painted drywall that had only been in situ for less than 48 hours. After cutting a couple of well placed holes, we discovered that the gas line was 95% blocked by a stupid little piece of round plastic sitting perfectly in the end of the pipe. How does that even happen? We cleared the end, put the pipes all back together and I texted Jeff a picture of the holes in his brand new wall and said 'Dryer's fixed!'

After

I was so happy to have the laundry back that I was quite prepared to live with holes in the wall for a while but Jeff was so ticked by the whole thing that he had them patched and painted again within 48 hours! And with it properly lit and clean walls this corner has been totally transformed.

After after

Right now Jeff is working on drywalling the rest of the garage. He has pulled a couple of internal walls down and rebuilt them, moved a doorway, and has plans to redo the garage floor. I am looking forward to the day it all looks as clean and bright as this corner!