My Garage Plan, Updates, What’s Left and Balancing the Budget

My Garage Plan: rolling with the punches! As most of you know from my 2019 summer post I’ve been working on my garage for LITERALLY months now. When I was growing up our family home had a three car garage that was just awesome. (Seriously, I spent one winter rollerblading in part of it!) Having a large garage was an absolute must for me. So, back when I tackled this renovation, my brother and I went to Menards and I ordered myself a BIG garage.

My dad and brother helped me pour and finish the cement slab (they did most of the work – a concrete layer I will never be!) and then I came home one day and my brother had put the walls up for me too! (I damned near cried! I was in the house putting up walls there so to not have to frame in my garage too was just incredible.)

I hired a couple of guys and rented a telehandler to put on the rafters and the roof. After that I put up furring strips and house wrap around the entire building. At that point my ex told me he was going to take over: he would finish the roof and put on the siding, soffits and trim etc..

I was thrilled to have one less thing to do at the time!

But then I realized last year that he didn’t complete the main fascia because he had installed it wrong. It was meant to be put on BEFORE/UNDER the siding. I really considered the time and effort it would take me to take off the siding on the gabled ends, fix what he did wrong and then put the siding back on.

Here’s the truth though: its wrong but it actually won’t hurt anything.

Is it going to make me VERY angry the entire time I finish his job incorrectly? You betcha! But at least it will be done and I’ll ever be the only person that cares or notices.

Sometimes you just have to take the bullet…

This spring I had the electricity moved from the barn to the side of my garage so I was ready to go when the weather finally turned and I was so excited I actually started writing this blog post in April! During that same time my best friend Rachie helped me move my horses’ stock tank into the garage as well.

Because I designed my garage extra large I will have room for a seating area complete with couches, coffee table, end tables and a buffet all with room to spare for my car too.

Along half of one wall I’ll be putting in some great shelves for all of the wood storage I could possibly need. I’ll also be putting in an access door because, currently, there is no way to get into my garage besides the garage doors. And, the coolest thing in the whole dang world, ELECTRIC GARAGE DOOR OPENERS!

The overall cost is around $1,000 all together which is why I’ve been saving money by bill tracking, repurposing, and pinchin’ pennies where I can. Even with the added effort, I’ve still been working on this for months now and am only now just starting to finish it up here in August.

Money wasn’t my only obstacle though as just getting the materials to my house was a major problem!

It just seemed SO dumb to pay $200 to have it all shipped to me when its only a 45 minute drive! But it was only really worth it if I happened to be out of town with my Mom (and her SUV) anyway, otherwise four trips in an SUV and a whole day of driving made that $200 for shipping look like a wash…

So over the first few months of this year I slowly gathered all of the materials on my list. My Mom is such a good sport! 😀

Mom: Let’s take an afternoon off and go to the mall!
Me: That sounds amazing – mind if I totally fill your car with insulation too?

If you read my Summer Updates post you know I was hit by some HUGE incentive this June when my best friend conceded to let us give her a milestone birthday party at my house.

Meanwhile my garage was a DISASTER because I had literally just pulled everything off the walls and stacked it like a giant jigsaw puzzle in the middle. And I was NOT going to un-stack it all only to have to re-stack it again!

Which meant I had five weekends to run electric and finish the walls.

Once I got it wired my plan had been to insulate the walls, cover them with plastic sheeting and then cover the top half of the walls with foam board. I then planned to cover the bottom four feet of the walls with steel recycled off of the old shed at the back of my barn… it was gonna be a cool and rustic corrugated wainscoting!

SO, the first set back was when a friend of mine and I hauled a ladder, two hammers (including my big FatMax framing hammer) a pick ax and two crow bars to the old shed to rip the steel off of it… and we got our asses handed to us.

I am certain that shed will out live me!

I was SO bummed!

It was only two days later that my Mom and I had planned a trip out of town to go shopping and get the last of the insulation for the walls of my garage.

Except I no longer had any idea what I was going to get to replace my steel.

And THEN it turned out that 8×4 sheets of anything were just too big for my mom’s SUV anyway so I had a full on “OH SHIT” moment standing in Menards!

So, sheets of foam board were suddenly out of the question as well!

I had no plan anymore!

Because I know someone will ask: NO I never (not even once) had any intention of hanging sheet rock in my garage. I feel most garages sheet rock is just plain a BAD idea anyway but it was more than that for me. I wanted the steel wainscoting for toughness and my choice of foam board above it meant my garage walls could literally be HOSED DOWN if they needed to be. So even though I no longer had the steel or the foam board options I still wanted durability and something I could WASH and that would never mold.

We looked at all possible alternatives and, you guys know me, I am not above totally weird repurposing to save money as long as its safe and works. I even considered the big rolls of screen (the stuff used for screened in porches) because they were affordable but that was too weird even for me.

It had to fit in my mom’s SUV and it had to be in my non existent budget.

And then, on our way back to the front, we stumbled upon a 4×100 foot roll of bubble wrap insulation for only $99. (Here’s a link to basically the same thing on Amazon – its quite cool!) It was tough enough, it was affordable and it would fit in my mom’s car! On top of that it even had an R value of 3!

Besides all of that though it could also be covered up someday when I have the budget for rigid foam board.

Finally I had a REAL plan!