The New Garage (Babble)

Thanks again to people who commented on my Garage vs Deck dilemma.  When I made up my mind on the compromise garage I decided I wanted it done before Ian got home.  That didn’t exactly work out (partially because of all the rain here, and partially because they had to special order a door that held everything up at the end), but the really important part of it was done in time which was the mural wall that faces the house.  We were able to decorate that with a ‘Welcome Home’ sign for Ian before he got back to Milwaukee.

To reiterate, the problem with the old garage was that it was very small and (inside) pretty icky, and starting to cave in on one side.  To make a two car garage the entrance would have to face the alley.  The problem with that is the city would require us to set the garage four feet back, which would have chopped deeply into our deck and put the garage uncomfortably close to the house.  So the design of the new garage would have a ‘reverse gable’ (which means the roof peak would run the other direction) and the part of the roof that hung over the entrance would be eight feet long to provide some protection for whatever car was parked outside. There was no way to have any poles to support the overhang and still be able to get into the garage, so it had to be done with cantilevers, which meant the garage ended up being extra tall to provide room for that kind of bracing.


The only real issue I had with the builders was the guy who was supposed to tear down the existing garage.  I was told he’d be there on a Thursday at 7:30 a.m.  That’s early for me in the summer, so I set my alarm so I could be awake and dressed to let the guy in to shut off power to the garage.  7:30 came and went, then 8:00, then 9:00….  I called the builders who tracked him down and reported he’d be there around 10:00.  When he finally arrived sometime after 10:00, he looked at the deck and the wall by the alley and shook his head saying, “Nobody told me about all of this.  I’d have had to be here at 7:30 to get all this done.”  I nodded and said something like, “Oh, you don’t say?” and in my head I thought something more like, “Well I was #$^&@&! up at @#!*!# 7:30!…. but I digress.

Apparently nothing could be done at 10:00, so he shut off the power so I wouldn’t have to be awake for that the next time he came, and he left.  The next day I went down to Chicago to pick up my brother for a short visit, and when I left at 2:00 my garage was still untouched.  I told Barrett on the drive up to Milwaukee that when we got here I might have a garage, or I might not.  Impossible to know.  What I had was a garage with no doors or windows:

Nothing happened Saturday.  Then Sunday morning at around 7:00 a.m. there was a ton of chainsaw noise and the whole thing came down.  It was weird to watch because somehow he did the roof last.  I guess it’s good I build violins and don’t demolish buildings because I would have done it from the top down, and apparently that would have been the wrong way to go.  It was a crazy amount of construction/destruction noise on a Sunday.  Aden suggested maybe the guy didn’t do it on Saturday because he could be Jewish.  I told her I thought it was unlikely, but an interesting hypothesis.

For a few days my kids climbed past the yellow caution tape to play on the remaining concrete slab.  I usually came out to find a folding chair and a hula hoop out there.  Not quite sure what that game was, but it kept them very amused.

Next, there was a noisy morning of tearing out all the concrete.  That left an amazing muddy mess that got rained on frequently.

Now, the funny thing at this point was the backyard has been so boxed in for so long that it was weird having it open.  I noticed many neighbors suddenly deciding to walk their dogs down the alley to kind of take a peek at the back of our house.  I actually started going out and picking up the toys a bit more just because, well, people could see.  The family room has a lot of windows that I never worried about before, because the garage and fencing made that whole space private.  It was nice to see out, though.  I have a friend who keeps suggesting I could continue the fence farther up along the side yard, but I’m more inclined to tear fences down than put more up.  I like having a private play space for the kids to use where they aren’t observable from the street, but my personal preference is for open spaces.  Anyway, the mud functioned as a barrier to the yard, so it was like having a moat.

After that came the new concrete, and I started to get a sense of how much bigger the new garage was going to be.  We expanded it back farther, and in toward the deck, and out toward the alley a little.  It’s funny, because it could easily hold two cars, there’s just no way to get them both in there.  Or maybe someday we could each have our own tiny Smart Car and we could get them all inside.  In any case, it will be wonderful to have room for things like bikes and a lawnmower, etc., instead of having those things strewn all over the yard like they are now.

After about a week of watching concrete dry, construction happened in a blink.  The kids watched a lot of it from above on the terrace.

Then I started getting panicky because the thing was looking huge.  Obscenely huge, and I was wondering if I’d done the right thing or made a big expensive mistake.  And it could have been more huge, because the day they came to pour the concrete they tried to talk me into cutting a couple of feet into the deck and I told them to change their design instead.  If I’d wanted to cut into the deck we’d have gone with a two car garage, and we’d already lost a birch tree that I was sad had to come down, so no cutting into the deck.  (Because of the last minute design change they had to order a different door, which is why that didn’t happen on time.)

My next door neighbor assured me it was going to be fine, even though the garage looks almost as big as her house.  She said I was probably just used to the open space after a few weeks, and we’d get used to the garage once it was finished.  She was right, of course, but that wasn’t a nice feeling that day, wondering if I’d made a giant goof.

My main concern at that point was getting the mural wall finished.  The kids and I had discussed what we wanted to do, but it all hinged on the caulk between the stucco boards drying in time for us to paint.  We bought almost a dozen sample size containers of exterior latex paint in lots of bright colors and kept poking the caulk.  After the kids were in bed I found a bucket in the basement of the same yellow the last owners had used to paint the house with a couple of years back.  I went out in the dark and rolled color onto the primed boards everyplace but the seams.  (Looks yellow here, doesn’t it?  After the YELLOW went on that the kids picked out for their mural, the background color didn’t look yellow at all anymore.)  It was funny painting in the dark, racing to finish a house project before Ian returned from his deployment. 

The last time he finished a tour in Iraq I’d spent a couple of weeks painting our new front porch on the old house every night until about 2:00 a.m. to get it done in time.  I thought of that as I swatted mosquitoes and tried not to drip paint on the deck as I worked.  I wondered why I wasn’t just doing it in the daytime like a normal person, but then when the kids were awake the next day and begged to help I remembered exactly why doing it at midnight was preferable.  There are many projects that I’m willing to find ways for them to help, but not on a deadline.

When the caulk was dry and the last of the background paint was up and also dry, it was time to be creative!  I sketched out some letters and boxes with a sharpie, and each kid got a box to paint however he or she wanted.  Then we all collaborated on decorating the rest of the background.  Even my neighbor, Julie, pitched in!  She did the morning glories on the left, which is good, because that’s the part she’s most likely to see from her own yard, so if she doesn’t like it she has only herself to blame.  (I think she did an amazing job and I love seeing her flowers up as part of our mural.)

The kids are really proud of the work they did.  It certainly personalizes the garage!  Ian loved it.  I made the decision to go with “Welcome Home” as the message, as opposed to ‘Welcome Home Daddy’ or ‘Welcome Home Ian’ because I figure the odds are good we may not get around to painting again anytime in the near future, and this way if it’s still up in ten years it just welcomes home anyone getting back from work or school or wherever.
And here is the finished garage!  (Sort of.  The electrician still has to come out and make it possible to, I don’t know….open the door.)  But to all outward appearances it’s done, and I’m glad.  There is still some finishing work to do to the deck to get it to work up against the garage, but that will be another project.  There is always another project.

(Yay!)

Garage vs Deck: Decision (Babble)

Thanks for all the input!  It really did help me figure out what to do.  Which is good, because when I tried to discuss it with my husband he finally just called me from Iraq and said essentially that he has no idea what his opinion is.  He loves me more than he cares about the garage, the deck, or the money, so anything I picked that made me happy he was good with.  (That sounded really sweet until I realized that he was being no help at all with this decision, but whatever.  It’s like I tell my customers when they can’t decide between two violins they like at my store: They can’t choose wrong so they shouldn’t worry about it too much.)

Anyway, based on city regulations, trees, yard space, and car needs, the final plan I’m going with is…sort of a compromise.  We’re knocking down the old garage and expanding it out toward the alley a little on one side, and right up to the deck on the other.  Currently there is hard to use space between the deck and the garage itself, so the deck will be spared but the patch of dirt I will never garden next to it is going.  With a one and a half car garage we’d have space to store our bikes (five people’s worth of bikes is a lot of bikes) and we can have a door that opens into the backyard.  The gate I don’t like will get taken out and new cement steps up to the deck from the driveway will be put in.  The new garage door will be 16 feet wide and 8 feet tall, so whichever car we park in there will fit easily, and I’ll have room to store the yard equipment and toys that are currently piled up in the basement or getting wet in the yard.  They are going to cantilever an 8 foot overhang in front of the door, so there will be some protection for the car parked outside.  (We can’t build a real carport because there is no place for a pole to hold it up and still get a car into the garage.)  The wall facing the deck will be stucco so the kids can paint a mural on it, and the rest will be vinyl siding to match the look of the house.

It’s not a perfect plan, and it’s more expensive that what I wanted, but since replacing the garage is more a matter of when than if, it makes sense to do it now while we have the money to do it and we can get some real use out of it.  I think it will be good.  Even my kids, who are never good with change, are excited about the idea.  Last night we talked about it over mud pie on the deck, and it turns out they miss being able to play in the garage on rainy days.  They used to bike in circles in the one at the old house.  I finally let them inside the current one for the first time since we moved and they were horrified.  It was so dark and cramped and spooky that every one of them said, “We need a new garage.”  So there we go.

The contractor is going to try and squeeze us in as soon as possible so that it can all be finished before August.  I told the guy I didn’t want there to be any kind of construction work still happening by the time my husband gets home.  When Ian gets back I want it all to be settled and done.  He shouldn’t have to come home to any sort of upheaval, he should just be able to enjoy being home.  (And by enjoy being home, I mean enjoy the big list of projects for him to do that I’ve been compiling since April.  —Kidding Sweetie!  Kind of…)

So that’s the plan.  I hope we like it.

UPDATE:  My husband informs me that he did express an opinion!  He said as long as the overhang wasn’t a problem it was worth the expense.  I was probably just too enthralled with actually hearing his voice that I missed that part.  I miss his voice.

Garage vs Deck (Babble)

Here is my big project question of the moment:  Should we build a new garage?

I love our new house, but the detached garage behind it is becoming an issue.  To solve it by building a new garage we’d have to cut severely into the deck. I’m having trouble deciding what to do.  (This doesn’t qualify as a problem.  I acknowledge our lives will continue to be fine either way, but I could use some input.)

Here’s the story on the existing garage:  It’s a single car garage, not in great shape.  The automatic door has no sensor to stop it from potentially squishing kids.  There is no second exit from the garage, so if a kid got stuck inside, well, he or she is pretty stuck.  The past owners it didn’t have kids so it didn’t matter, but as a parent it makes me nervous.  The garage is in an alley, but the entrance faces a small driveway.  Right now what happens is I park the small car in the garage and the minivan in the drive, which blocks the small car in.  With Ian away it’s not like we’re using both cars all the time, but I can see this getting annoying fast once he’s back.  It’s certainly not the end of the world, but I don’t like parking the minivan outside where I’m going to have to dig it out of the snow all winter and worry about it potentially getting broken into in the summer.  A simple, two car garage is within our budget, and it makes sense that if the current garage will need to be replaced at some point anyway, we should just get it done now so it better meets our needs rather than be frustrated.  I do not want to sink any money into the existing goofy garage.  It would be nice to have a good garage.

This is the garage (it’s in worse shape than it looks in photos for some reason):

But!  To build the garage means drastically changing our backyard.  To conform to regulations about setting it back from the alley, etc., it would cut into the deck about 8 feet or more, and a good chunk beyond that would have to be destroyed just to make space for building to happen.  Plus the finished result is a garage that would feel like it’s practically in our family room.  We’d lose a birch tree, and we’d go from a spacious feeling when we step out the back door to one that is very closed in and cramped.  I don’t see any point in bothering to build a new garage if it can’t hold both our cars, but the amount of space that would take up is more considerable than I first imagined.

This is the current view of the garage from the family room, looking across the deck:  (And yes, I know that looks like a door that could be used to exit the garage on the left, but it doesn’t lead to anything on the inside.)

See that flower pot on the deck on the far right in the above picture?  That’s about where the new garage would come to.

That’s just a lot of space to lose and I don’t know if it’s worth it.  I’d have to figure out something positively gorgeous to do to that garage wall, too, since we’d have it right in our faces.

It’s not like there is no more yard past the deck, but what little yard there is has been kind of taken over by the play set.  The only decent space in the backyard left for adults is really on the deck.

Side note:  In case anyone else is about to assemble such a play set, here’s something we did with ours that’s worked out well.  We put hooks on the top of the rock climbing wall instead of bolting it in place, and we didn’t bolt down the slide.  Everything is safe and holds together just fine, but we can rearrange the set when we want to.  We can pull both things off if the kids need better access to the little picnic table, and we can put the slide pointing in a new direction periodically (which gives some of the grass a break).  At the moment the kids like the slide coming right off the deck.  (We’re also able to switch out a swing for a trapeze bar easily.  It helps to keep them from getting bored with the set if we can keep changing it.  Not that they get bored easily–To my kids the playhouse area is either a ship or a clubhouse and there are elaborate games with rules I can’t follow and there is always something busy going on there.)

(Oh, and I have a friend who has older kids who don’t use their play set anymore, and she had the brilliant idea to string a hammock on it, and the clubhouse area is covered with plants, so now it’s her own little relaxing spot in her backyard.  Doesn’t that sound cool?)
Okay, so back to my quandary:  On the one hand, it seems stupid to give prime space to cars when we should just put up with the parking inconveniences and enjoy our deck.  On the other, we can only hang out on the deck certain months of the year and we would use the garage all the time.  A decent garage would be extremely practical for us and safer for the kids and the cars.  Parking on the street in Milwaukee costs money and you have to move cars to the opposite side each night, plus our smaller car has had the radio stolen twice while parked on the street, so it’s not a great option.  (I’m sure my husband who created a pro-public transit site called “Milwaukee Without a Car” is in his heart thinking “Let’s just get rid of a car,” but I remember the days before we had the third kid that necessitated our getting the minivan.  There were a lot of Army Reserve weekends where he drove off and I was stranded with small kids and few options.  For a family of five that second car comes in very very handy.)

So, garage or deck?  Any opinions or ideas?