Garage Conversion - Livable Space!

The Problem: New baby on the way and my third bedroom is currently occupied by a whole lot of unfriendly baby’s room kinds of things; computer, piano, files, drums, et al. Obviously this bedroom will have to cover the new baby, but where to put the miscellany…

The Task: Stretch the house’s livable space by converting a portion of the garage. Evacuate old office and make it a baby’s room!

Timeline: How long could it possibly take to convert half of your garage to livable space? Surely I’ll be done shortly after the baby arrives (in 1 month).

The Project: After the plans were settled, I had decided that I would cut my garage in half to have a 10×20 room added to the house, while maintaining another 10×20 space as garage/workshop space. The division, after some consideration, was placed across the garage’s depth as opposed to the more popular idea of dividing it by its width. Had I divided it by the width, we’d still have the potential of keeping a one-car garage. However, we have no need (nor reality) of storing cars in the garage. It currently stores my woodworking equipment and a host of stored items. Also, dividing it that way would have involved taking out the garage door and replacing it with a single door. A cost which may have been offset by the sale of the double-door, but would also have resulted in a lot more work overall. As such, I divided it across the depth and maintain the facade of a double-car garage. The advantage this offers me is that I can open up the entire workshop for the ease of pulling equipment out, loading plywood panels, or general cleanup.

In addition to this most critical of decisions, I also decided to knock out a doorway in the shared wall between home and garage, rather than continuing to use the “garage” door. I want this new room to be an integral part of the house, and a door would not help me to convey this. I also added a door on the erected wall dividing the garage and new office space.

The project’s tasks were not incredibly difficult, though some were more time consuming than others. As it happens, I learned that my mud job on the drywall was not nearly as good as I thought. There were many firsts, but drywall took the cake for being the one that really did require a level of mastery I could not attain during the job. The only other hardship was leveling the garage floor. I doubt any garage floor is level, but mine happened to sag severely through the middle where there might have been several inches difference between the center point and one of the corners. I fastened pressure treated lumber to the concrete floor to build a leveled platform upon. It went a little like building a deck – it just required a lot more adjustments in the way of tapered cuts. Afterword, I put on T&G floor sheathing to tie everything together and wound up hitting a stagnation point.

I had expected that I could knock out a lot of work during the 2 weeks of paternity leave I took after Sorscha was born, but as it turned out, I was only minimally able to work in the room. Over the next few months, I erected the dividing wall, did a lot of site cleanup, and installed insulation in both the walls (the floor was already done) and the ceiling.

In March, I finally put in the drywall. It took a long time to finish the mud and tape job. I really needed four consecutive days to do the job, but it got broken up and so required more time. I finally finished the job almost 3 months later. The walls remained unprimed for most of the rest of the year as work halted while I figured out what to do about the ceiling. I wanted to texturize it to match the rest of the house, but I didn’t want to buy the equipment – I just couldn’t find anywhere to rent it. I finally broke down in the Fall and bought a popcorn gun with hopper and primed everything.

The ceiling application was one of skill mastery that took me several tries to get right. It’s all about the consistency of the stuff. I couldn’t get it right and I didn’t have an example to put my hands in for comparison. It was really messy work, but when I got the thickness correct, it was messier still!

With the ceiling finished and walls primed and ready for paint, things were looking good for the final success of this long-running project. Fast forward to the 2009 Christmas holiday and things finally got wrapped up.

My wife got the room painted and I was able to lay down our laminate floor and finish it off with molding. These last few things didn’t take more than a couple of days to complete, so one would wonder why took over a year to complete the entire process.

For the would-be do-it-yourselfers out there, realize that it’s going to take you longer to do the same job a professional could do, and you won’t have contiguous time to do it either. If life interrupts you, it’s likely that your house job is going to get put on hold “until things ease up a bit.” It won’t happen, so you just have to make the time available you need to finish a specific section or phase of the project. Looking back, if money was not one of the chief reason I am a DIYer, I would have hired out the drywall work. I enjoyed the other parts a great deal and wouldn’t necessarily want to miss out on that fun!

In the end, we have a beautiful room to enjoy as an integral part of the house. Today, it houses my office stuff, studio grand piano, and a myriad of toys and activity center things for the kids. Sorscha has her bedroom all to herself and it is quite lovely as a baby’s room! Now if I can just get started on my workshop space, things will pretty sweet around here.

-- It takes a viking to raze a village.