House Report 34: Jeff's man palace

When we bought our last house the garage was the first thing that Jeff renovated. His thinking was that he needed a functional garage in order to work on all the other rooms. I am not sure what happened this time but the garage has been (almost) the last room to get done, and by the time we got around to it Jeff had been itching to do it for a long time! 

Just after Jeff finished the main garage (which we can't use because the garage door broke so it's still a giant game room for the kids) he started on the 3rd car garage. The plan was always that it would be a workshop. It was the most awful place, full of rusty dusty junk, so stuffed full that you had to squeeze in through tiny channels through all the rubbish. I went in there once to try and find something and a bunch of stacked drywall fell on me and if Bill hadn't been there to rescue me I'm not sure I would have made it out! Since we've moved in anything we don't know what to do with has been dumped in the 3rd car garage, so the first thing to do was a major clear out. It took weeks. In the course of clearing it out we found the original building permit for the house from 1973 nailed to some framing under the drywall, and an old rotary phone which Nicholas had so much fun playing with that we put it back in on the new wall! 

It had two garage doors - one at the front and one at the back. There was no spring on the one at the back, so anytime you opened it you had to prop it up with a ladder and hope that it didn't fall on anyone's head. So one of the first things we did was get rid of that garage door. I was so happy to see it go.  Now we have a normal door in a normal wall instead of a pull through at the end of the garage - and light gets in. It's so much nicer.

He put in a window in the outside wall, drywalled the whole thing, put in new wall cabinets and about 10 feet of butcher block workbench. I don't actually know how long it is, but it's long. By the time he was done, the workshop is the fanciest room in the house, hands down. It's the only room with a chair rail and two tone walls. Also the only room in the house with a built in vacuum system in the walls and built in speakers in the ceiling!

We still need a new garage door at the front, but Jeff's man palace is 95% done!