Life's a Garden

When we bought our place, the garage was leaking from everywhere. The first line of business was a new roof, which we put on in September of 2014. We recently finished installing drain tile and re-grading around the foundation which wrapped up all of our leakage issues! Here are photos from the project:


Always have to start these off with a before pic! Here is the garage on day one. There were rotten railroad ties stacked next to the foundation and the grade was directing water right into the unsealed blocks of the garage.


Digging around the foundation

While we had an excavator at our house, we also dug lines from the house to the garage for two water hydrants (one at front of garage and one at back for chicken coop)

All opened up!


We tarred and parged the foundation to seal it up.

Hydrants installed. While we were at it, we put a water line to the inside of the garage for a sink (YAY!)

Drain tile added, and dirt pushed back in place. Re-graded to prevent further leakage.

Opposite side of garage. While this side wasn't leaking, we were proactive and installed a swale to prevent future issues.

All done! It always feels good to check another thing off the list :)

One Step at a Time

Just wanted to post a quick update on the garage. The guy who helped us put on the new roof (a relative of Jeremy's) is finishing up the trim and gable siding. As of today when I took these pictures just the back siding has been put up. He still has to finish up some trim and put the siding on the front gable.



You can tell what a difference the coat of parge makes in this photo. We are still waiting on a quote to do the entire outside of the shop. Then we will paint it to match the color of the tan siding. Right now the colors look a little funky but that should be fixed when we paint.



I can't get over how blue the sky was in these pictures! It was a beautiful (albeit chilly) day today. You can see my poor boarded up house in the background. Next it's her turn to be beautified :-)



The grading around the shop is really poor, right now everything drains towards the foundation so water seeps inside after it rains. We have someone scheduled to come in with an excavator and dig around the shop, coat the foundation with some heavy duty sealant, lay drain tile, and re-grade. Hopefully that will solve our leakage problems!

Parging & Porticos

In my last post I mentioned that we had a mason coming out to reinforce the back wall of the shop, fix the chimney, and parge the concrete block. Here are some photos of the finished product!

One of the pillars on the inside of the shop (they added two on the back wall)


The other pillar. When the parge dries it will look like concrete. The mason was also kind enough to finish the hole in the wall for our corn stove pipe :-)

Back wall of shop with a coat of parge. See that stump beside the chimney? That thing's roots were the culprit of the leaning wall!

Chimney reattached to building

Overall we are really happy with how it turned out. The parging was done as an added layer of strength but we liked the look so much that we are getting a price to do the entire outside.

On the inside you can notice the color difference between the block and the parging. This will be covered up when we paint the inside white. The only noticeable difference will be in texture. Speaking of colors, here is the color scheme for the garage:

Tan: Outside  |  White: Trim & Inside  |  Charcoal: Roof  |  Copper Penny: Portico roof

The copper penny color is hard to show, but it is very beautiful in person with a hint of shimmer. We decided to dress up the front of the shop a little with a portico above the man door (example below) and are going to use standing seam metal in the copper penny color for that.

Chilly Saturday

We were lucky enough to be able to spend all day working at the house today.

We have had a pile of tree stumps sitting in the yard since we did our first big clean up, so today we borrowed a dump truck from work and finally got them out to the woods. We still have quite a few stumps to dig out but that is for another day :-)

We have a mason coming tomorrow to reinforce the rear wall and chimney in the shop. Initially, we noticed the chimney was separating from the building and were planning on tearing it down and rebuilding a new one, but our mason found that it was actually the rear wall that was leaning away from the chimney. The plan is to add two support pillars to the back wall and reconnect the chimney. I will post updated photos tomorrow!

Anyways, in order to install these new support pillars we had to rip out the back wall of the paint booth, so that was our main goal for today. The paint booth's drywall had become moldy and gross because of the roof leak so it had to come out either way.

Day 1 at the paint booth

Drywall down, just insulation left

Finally down to the concrete block!

While the boys were cleaning out the paint booth, I kept busy hauling dump truck loads and doing other small jobs. I took the door off the outhouse today to save the hardware because the lean-to it's in is being torn down soon.

Here is a photo of our lovely outhouse

Up close

The lean-to

Awesome mis-matched roof with whole timbers!

I am a little sad about it because its a neat old building, made from whole round trees. Unfortunately it hasn't been well maintained and has a lot of rot that compromises it's structural integrity. It's also in a bad spot - right behind the house.

So... bye bye shed. But on a positive note, check out all that awesome lumber I will have for crafts!!

Shop Roof

The shop's roof was in bad shape with several holes that were letting rain in. We decided to replace the shingles with metal to match the house. The color we picked is charcoal gray with white trim.

BEFORE

A tree limb had fallen on the already rotted shingles and created a pretty good sized hole in the roof

Lots of man hours to get the trees and ivy off of the building...

DURING

Ronnie, Jeremy's brother, cutting lumber to make purlins.

View from inside the garage after the shingles were removed.

Robin installing the purlins to lay the metal sheets on.


Robin, Ronnie, and Jeremy laying the first sheet of metal.

AFTER

Lookin' good!

Almost done! Time for trim :-)