Replacing an old garage door with a wall

Our garage door to wall transformation is nearly complete. Complete enough to show you some progress shots anyway.

We initially planned to hire this job out, but after asking my dad what kind of contractor I should call, he sort of just took the job on himself. Yes, he's great. No, I'm not sharing him.

He started by ripping out the old door, door frame and the flimsy insulation, leaving a giant hole in the house. That hanging plastic was there just to block the wind some and keep the debris outside.

The end of day one was looking a lot like this.

We decided to do a wood frame wall rather than a stone or masonry wall for one main reason: weight. The weight of cinder blocks or poured concrete would have demanded busting up the floor plus part of the driveway and pouring deep concrete footings to support it all. More work, more money, more trouble. Nope, a stud frame wall will do just fine.

But one thing we could not do without was adding a window. It's what I wanted most out of this project: natural light in a dark and dingy basement. I'm hoping to turn this space into a work area, so it was a necessity. The long and skinny 2 x 6 foot window was special order from Lowe's for $160; I was surprised it didn't cost more.

I wasn't completely sold on the idea of having a small patch of siding on the house, but there are not a lot of options for weatherproof exterior materials. Plus introducing a fourth material to the existing stone/brick/siding combo would probably have looked just as weird. So we used the same approximate color and style as the top and the back of our house.

The clay color also blends into the stone foundation color so from far away, it doesn't really draw attention to itself.

After some calling around to various to-the-trade siding distributors, I finally located the same(ish) siding in stock at Home Depot. Imagine that. (FYI, not all Home Depots carry the same siding color or profile in-stock, so if you can't find what you're looking for at one location, try another or check stock online. There's a good chance it's different.)

We still have to add some trim around the edges of the opening and then paint the wood the same tone as the siding, but with everything already weatherproof enough for winter, those jobs will probably have to wait until next spring.

And the inside?

The inside is still not complete, but that's OK. It tells you how bad it was that I can look at this unfinished wall and think it looks great.

If this photo is looking a bit wonky to you: the window is level, and the floor is not. The floor is actually far far from level. But that's an issue for another day (or never).

The view is nothing amazing, but look at that light! It's not a dungeon anymore! The natural light still catches me off guard when I go down the steps.

I mentally budgeted between $1000 and $2000 for this project, so I'm excited it only added up to about $420 with DIY labor. More money to spend on something else!

See the before pics >>

Next up: Closing up a garage door

Introducing our next renovation project: closing in this ugly and useless garage door.

If it were functional, this door would open up directly into our basement. That is, if you were to you walk down the basement steps, boom: you see where the car would be parked. Even if we wanted to use this space to park a car, I don't think it would be safe or up to modern code (i.e. exhaust could get into the living areas too easily).

We actually had a pair of these metal doors when we moved in, but we replaced the left one (that opens into the actual garage) with a modern thermal door and opener. But back to the door on the right...

It's old and thin aluminum. Somewhere along the line, someone tried to seal up the door on the inside to shut out the cold, but did a crap job of it all.

A couple of sheets of insulation board and a can of spray foam insulation isn't enough to keep anything warm. Not only is it not airtight, it is so thin, you can easily talk with someone outside through the door.

So after four and a half years of living with this makeshift scenario, we're finally going to replace the door with a real wall. A radical idea, I know! More details to come as we figure this whole thing out.

Ugh. Sometimes I feel like all we do around here is fix the weird and poor choices made by previous owners of our house. Anyone else in the same boat?

Update: Project complete! See the new wall here >>

Landscaping intervention, Part 1: Painted drain pipe

About a month ago, I mentioned that tackling the neglected area on the side of our house was on my short list. It's a long, narrow strip of dirt (about 4 x 36 feet!) right next to our neighbor's driveway. 

And it's kind of weird because that line along the concrete is the property line. Where I come from, property lines are vague distinctions far off in the grass, not five feet from the side of the house. But it is what it is. Luckily, they are nice neighbors.

My dad kicked off improving the space by burying a drainage pipe last month, and I'm using that as a spring board to motivate myself to finish off the space.

First things first (well, easy things first): painting the short length of PVC drain pipe sticking up above ground. The pipe is great and doing its job, but the obvious white PVC-ness of it all was looking cheap. And that printed label on the pipe wasn't super attractive.

After wiping the pipe clean, I masked off the area with a couple pieces of cardboard. I wrapped a newspaper around the aluminum downspout and kind of shoved it inside the PVC, but I didn't use tape anywhere!

Then I used everyone's favorite spray paint, Rust-oleum's oil rubbed bronze. It's a paint and primer in one and it adheres to plastic (important!). It's not exactly a match to the brown downspout, but I'm OK with that. I just wanted the PVC to look like metal or clay or something other than white plastic, and the oil rubbed bronze color blends nicely.

See what I mean? Much better! This is one of those details that takes five minutes, and that no one but me is ever going to notice on its own, but it affects the way the area looks as a whole.

Disregard all of those weeds and the spray paint on the dirt. We'll save those for next time.

Some light weekend trench digging: Re-routed drainage pipe

It's a post about dirty dirt! Sorry. But this sort of work lays the foundation for prettier projects, so it has to be done.

Last weekend my dad created a new drainage system from this downspout on the side of our house to direct the water away from the foundation and toward the back yard. We had a little bit of seepage into the basement in this general location and on the outside the ground had eroded away.

The former drainage system (if you could call it that) was here when we bought the house: a big piece of black corrugated pipe. With holes in it. So the water would flow out of the downspout, into the pipe and then flow out the holes and into the ground next to the foundation. Stupid.

I don't have a good before photo or lot of progress photos. I don't think my dad likes me taking photos of him while he's working. And I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm nuts for taking photos of holes in the ground or such things.

And I don't have a lot of details, but he dug a trench in the shape of a J and buried a similarly shaped PVC pipe maybe a foot below the surface.

The water now empties into an area I call the mud pit. Or the ugly corner. Or just the back corner. It goes by many not-nice names.

Now that the drainage pipe has gone underground and the surface has been re-leveled, it's looking much more put together. That black corrugated plastic pipe was ruining everything! Good riddance. This gives me some incentive to continue improving this area.

The hostas are just starting to come up here, and I have a plan to divide the larger ones and send them down the line to the blank spots toward the back. (I've been doing this for a couple of years now to generate enough plants to fill the space, and this might be the last time I have to do that.)

This area is on the side of the house that I don't see everyday. It's kind of out-of-sight/out-of-mind and gets horribly weedy. The loose plan is to lay down some landscaping fabric to stop the weeds and then add some rock to finish things off.

And then there's my mud pit where the water is going to drain now. It's pretty much wasted space. Nothing grows here, so my plan is to lay some rock and brick I've salvaged from around our property to hold the soil and make the area walkable in the muddy seasons.

p.s. No digging activity at our house would be complete without uncovering buried treasure. Check back tomorrow to see what we found!

Why you shouldn't paint over wall paper...

Because many years from now, when the wall has been painted over a dozen times, the paint will start cracking and someone will turn around and find their child peeling chunks of wall off the wall.

Hello fake wood grain wallpaper.

The rest of the wall is still intact, and this spot is fairly inconspicuous down by the baseboard, so for now, I am not fixing this. Instead I am going to be "fixing" this, probably by regluing this large paint chip back on the wall and then painting over it.

Someday when I've run out of projects and have nothing better to do, maybe I'll tackle repairing these walls the right way. You know, because that just sounds like so much fun.

Stupid old house. I love you, but you are definitely stupid.

How to patch plaster and hide a water stain

Remember the collection of ugly, embarrassing things I showed you last fall? This small leak above our fireplace was probably the most embarrassing for me. Maybe because you could see it as soon as you walked through our front door. Maybe because it nagged at me everyday.

It never gushed water or anything. I'm guessing there was a tiny crack letting in a drop at a time and, over many months, that led to bulging plaster.

But now that we replaced the roof (and all the other stuff) in December, I'm going to assume the leak is now fixed. And after letting everything dry out for over a month, I decided it was time to take care of the cosmetics.