I started back in October. The existing garage was dismanteled and relocated to become a garden shed.

I drew up a new design.

And I started building.


It will have 12' ceilings and radiant heat in the floor. The right most bay is extra wide for detailing and working with both car doors open if I want. Its 44 feet deep and the second floor is a 44 x 18 room. I need to take more pics because the roof is done and the windows are installed. The radiant heat is down and I am waiting for the slab to be poured. The 997TT will live in there along with the SL55(soon to get Kleeman K2), wifeys 4matic wagon, the ML63 that is on order, and my ML500. I have a full blog of the entire process if anybody is interested, it has been quite a trip. The blog is also posted elsewhere.

 

More!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Very nice garage. Link to the blog?

 

I don't want to send people to another forum so I'll put it here.
Part one of pimp my garage.

Its time for an extreme makeover for my garage. It is extra deep but also filled with garden and yard tools, mowers, and just plain ol junk. I needed to assemble my own Extreme Makeover Team (EMT), yours truly as the leader. I hope to finish the site work and close it in before winter, hopefully before Dec. Almost every sq ft of my house and yard will be going through this Extreme Makeover, but I will only bore you with the garage.

Please please, add any comments or suggestions, as they are welcome. Post your own garages too.

So sad looking with peeling paint.


Jammed with stuff. That’s my idea of a home lawn mower, a New Holland TC-21D Compact Tractor with a 52” belly mower (removable). Got a 4’ front end loader and a backhoe attachment too. Wifey gets very nervous when the backhoe attachment is on, with good reason.


Another view of more crap.


The new floor plan drawn by the EMT Leader, me.

5/8/06 note, wifeys 4matic will now be far left and the SL and 997TT will be far right, a lift will also be in the back at far right.

 

Part two.

Sunday with a chainsaw.

Here is what’s left of a fir tree. I dragged the rest into the forest to rot.

Handy tool for yard mayhem. You can jack up your lawn in min with these attachments.


Wifey wanted me to relocate her Peonies, dig a trench she said. This is the only area of our yard that was not supposed to have heavy equipment grind across it, so I messed it up myself. This mess looks far worse than the pic. I swear I was not on drugs, but it looks like it in person.


I applied for my building permits today. Hope it goes smoothly.

 

Part three 11/17/05.

Salvage and demolition start.

It took about 3 hours for three men to strip the roof and pack it in a dumpster.


The trusses were carefully removed and stored for later re-use. It sure makes the garage light inside.

The walls were separated, removed, and stacked. Waiting for the garden shed foundation to be ready. The shed foundation was dug today. If things go smoothly I should have the shed re-assembled sometime late next week.


A drainage problem is being addressed here.
Starting the run at the lower level. About 170 lin ft of 24 inch pipe was used.



The almost finished lower level. The rip rap lined pool is to slow the water velocity down before it crosses onto the neighbor’s property. There is a similar collection swale at the top of the pipe run.

I needed to do a bit of avian relocation for this project.

Wifey was upset because on Thursday I did a few donuts in the yard and flower garden. The pics above show what that area looks like now.

 

11/10/05
Baby sitting time.
The foundation turkeys(so soon to call them that) and I went a few rounds about how deep the footings were to be for the garage addition. It seems that they did not have 5' forms for the walls. They wanted to fill in the hole and raise the new footings. NFW I told them. The land elevations would get very screwed up if they did that. After a few rounds they "magically" found their 5' forms.
They stripped the footings of the garden shed and put up the wall forms. I had a load of stone put into the garage footing trench to fix a water seepage problem we were having and they were getting that area ready to pour the footings today.
I examined the shed forms and found the steel re-bar missing. 2 at the top and 2 at the bottom were in the spec. They were planning to pour the shed walls and the garage footings today. Hmm... There was no steel on their truck soooo.... I went up to the lead man and asked where the steel was. &&$#@$^*$ Yup! They were SOL for pouring today. I may make them take the shed forms apart to get steel at the bottom of the wall, as per spec.
I need to keep an eye on these turkeys.


A layer of washed stone solved this problem. Note the bird house is still standing. I don’t know how because there is no grass at the base, wiped out by machine movements.


Temp car home.

 

Mid Nov

The latest progress report.
The shed footings were poured on Monday, November 14.

Does this form look about 2 feet short? This was why the form guy was swearing, his screw up.

I made the turkeys open up the shed forms and put the re-bar in. The walls were poured on Tuesday. They poured the garage footings on Tuesday as well.

Late Thursday afternoon we started to reassemble the shed on its new foundation. By the end of Saturday it was up and ready for roof shingles, and was wired with 110 and 220 volt power. You can see the underground feeds in the photo.

Garage footings stripped.

I needed to raise the existing footings by 12”. Here you see the “dowels” that we drilled into the old concrete, to bond the new with the old.

The ring saw was used again to cut part of the house footing away.

Dowels into the side of the house foundation. Another wall will be poured here for a large house addition. This addition will have a full basement, unlike the rest of the house.

This was a rock that stuck up in my front yard. Not anymore. They used the demo hammer and destroyed the top 12” of it.

 

Early December 05

Project on hold.
I’m off to Barbados for a few weeks, and this will prob be the last post until late December, early January.
The concrete form crew were absent from the job since Monday of last week. Their absence screwed up the excavator’s schedule and he was forced to pull his idle equipment off the job, wasting his time and mine. I was told that they would “try” to get there Monday. Yeah right. Tuesday it rained in a heavy downpour and flooded the site. I called for a pump out Wednesday AM and the crew arrived at 7:30 and started the pumps. By 10:30 both the shed and the garage were pumped out. I was told that the garage walls were to be formed and poured today(Wed), and the excavator(pump people also) were told the same thing. I waited……..I waited…….. I was getting pissed and kept waiting. They finally arrived at 2:30 in the afternoon. I waited until they parked their truck and I went up to the window. Are you really going to form and pour these walls today? I asked. Are you kidding, its 2:30! Do you have room on your truck for the few forms that are in the hole? I asked. Then pack them up and leave. I sacked them. Enough is enough. The garage footing was now under 2 feet of water, and the hole was caving in at places. Beautiful weather wasted by the form turkeys. The shed was coming along nicely and the roof in now complete and some of the siding has been repaired. The inside has not been backfilled, and was left with muck from the rain.
By turkey day there was 6” of water over the garage footing, and by today there was a foot or more. Monday I will know when the new form company starts.

Water inside the shed.


Floating forms at the garage footing. Darn good thing the footing got in before the rain.


Flooded house excavation. If we had dug the full depth 6 more feet) the house would have caved in. We did not trust the form turkeys to dig the whole thing, rightly so.


Water streaming down the drive.


The trusses arrived during a break in the rain. The two top bundles are mine.

I had to call in for the extreme crew members to hand unload these because the low overhead wires prevented the use of the truck mounted crane. About 450 pounds each, wet.

 

To be continued.

 

By looking at the plan it seems to be all good I am very interested in seeing more pics ,please keep us in touch btw nice SL55 , Im with you get the Kleemann K2, Nice lineup of cars you have Ml500, Ml63 and 997tt on the way!

Awesome!

 

Kool keep us posted!

 

Time to load more from the Blog.

Design changes.
The toilet and shower will be located on the second floor, not the first. This will allow me to put a lift in the back of the large bay, as the ceilings are now 12’ plus at the first floor. The 9’ wide garage doors are going to be 8’ high instead of 7’, and most likely r15 insulation.

05 Year end progress report.
The garage foundation was finally finished, and we backfilled it New Years eve. This pic is a few days old, as the sills are on now and I am ready to start the walls. The replacement concrete people are very professional, one of the top 100 largest in the country, but their workers are hacks. 42 jacket size 2 hat, you know the type. The right garage wall drops ¾” in the first 6 feet, and rises up an inch higher at the back corner. The last turkey put in footing and foundation for the garden shed plus the garage footing, without getting a dime from me because he screwed up the schedule. This company will be no different. They already know that the work is sloppy and I think they are going to sack the jobsite leader.

The walls for the house required a concrete pump because of difficult access. $750.00 for 4 hours. Ouch!

The existing house has a 5 foot crawl space, no basement. The addition will have a full depth basement for utilities and storage. This pic shows a bit of the underpinning involved.

The wall between the arrows is called a “one sided pour” as it was poured first to underpin the existing foundation. Note the sloppy alignment of the walls that came after.

They stripped the forms and we can see the new foundation. Can you see anything wrong with this picture?

A bit closer.

The distance between the string and the block is how far the new foundation is out of square with the existing house, 2.5” in 12 feet!

They also left huge corner slags that show from outside of the house, and these must be removed. Concrete is easy to deal with when wet, but a b!*ch to remove when hard.

And finally, two days before Christmas they broke a window when stripping the forms. Wifey came home with groceries around 4PM and felt a cold breeze when she removed her coat. She turned and found the window broken, and the screen partially pushed in. Luckily, the screen contained almost all of the glass, and stayed mostly in place keeping our curious Burmese cats inside and safe. No one called us, they didn’t call their office, and they made no attempt to board up the window. The owner of the company grilled these two jerks for a hour before one of them fessed up to it. He fired both of them. Its not like they didn’t know they broke it, as glass was shot 10 feet away onto the piles of stripped forms.

I have a meeting with the top 3 honchos from the form company on Monday at 7:00AM. Things are going to get reeeel interesting.

On a happier note, the garden shed now has a nice concrete floor, and the doors and windows are installed. It’s now my material staging/workshop area for the rest of the job. It has power now, and will have lights next week.

 

1/12/06 Progress report.

The foundation is being replaced because the owner of the form company was horrified by what this “cowboy” had done. Their attitude was very professional and to the point. They want the job done right.
You sometimes wonder when someone tells you they are going to “make it right” just how long they are going to make you wait. I told the owner of the form company that I could wait until spring to get the foundation replaced. Nope. They think they will have it done by the end of next week. Damn! Their management people are real stand up guys, no bs at all. The sawing company made a few clean saw cuts to keep the good/existing walls yesterday, and the excavator demolished the bad walls today. I thought this was going to be a difficult process. Not so. The machine started at 7:30 AM and by 2:00 in the afternoon the whole thing was gone from the site, and the hole bottom was graded and ready for new walls. Demo was made very easy because the cowboy forgot to put the steel in the walls and footing. We could see this as the walls broke easily. Yikes. I will be posting video of the demolition this weekend.

This is the rail saw that cut the walls, cuts darn fast too. 30-30 inch blade I think, about three min to make each cut, and a half hour to setup each cut.


Below is what the site looked like after 15 min. The operator pulled down the walls, lifted the big pieces very high, and dropped them to break things up. He used the rubble as a ramp to reach further into the hole.


A few hours into it and this is all that is left, gets loaded into the dumpster behind.


By 2:00 it’s all gone.


And progress is being made on the garage. We have three walls up.

 

1/21/06 Progress report
A few progress steps made.
A pic of the previous form setup.

And the formwork done yesterday. Note the bracing every 6 feet. Little or no bracing on the forms the last time. This thing will be a work of art when they are done.

And I finally get to park in my new garage.