Our garage is a strange sort. It's semi-attached to our house and for us it doesn't function as a place to store a car, or even to store outdoor stuff necessarily. And so it goes our garage renovation not your typical experience as well. Let me explain.
The garage shares a roof with the rest of our house, but there's no direct entry between the house and the garage. This makes it ideal for what it actually serves as: Patrick's man cave. For nine years, it was an extremely unfinished space, with no insulation, no drywall, and a bare concrete floor. The doors were atrocious and barely hung on by the hinges.
He uses this space as his office, his smoking lounge (this is why its semi-attachedness was ideal), his place to put his collection of cords and computer junk, and sometimes as his sleeping space when he wants to stay up late and watch TV or work. We also keep our small tools in here, and our washer and dryer connections are in here as well, so its a laundry room too.
Once we paid off our home equity line of credit from other various little projects, like refinishing the floors, tiling the kitchen backsplash, and replacing the porch railing with columns, I wanted to take on something bigger and functional. So the garage it was. I took to Pinterest and came up with a few necessary things we should do:
- Add insulation and drywall on the walls and ceiling
- Install a stand alone HVAC system
- Wire in more lighting and electrical outlets
- Do something to the floors, maybe epoxy seal them
- Install two new doors, including a non-traditional garage door on the front
We had Local Happiness Construction do the insulation and the drywall, Northpoint Heating and Air to install the HVAC, and family helped us with the electrical work. Lowe's did the back door.
The Accordion Garage Door
The most exciting part for me was the new doors. I hated the noisy screeching of the front door rolling up or down, and I hated how it came off track and had to be held up in place with a metal bar. It was truly waiting to kill us somehow. But instead of replacing it with a quieter, traditional roll-up door, I wanted something different. Different always means custom, which means expensive — which this was, I am not going to lie. My inspirations were these pins, which I took to Southern Custom Doors and Hardware, where they quickly identified what I needed and helped me select the customizable aspects to make what we needed.
After measurements, about a month of waiting, and $6075 later, we had our beautiful door installed. I ordered raw fiberglass so I could paint it whatever color I wanted, something that took me me about half a year later to actually do. Here she is, in all of her glory. I still love this thing, and so does Patrick. Each day that it isn't freezing cold, he opens it up and spends his day working with the breeze blowing in. This thing is the piece de resistance for the whole reno as far as I am concerned!
And the price, yeah, it cost a lot. I wasn't great at keeping up with how much everything cost, and dipped into savings more than I planned, but the door is worth it. Not hearing that rickety old door groaning up and down is worth every cent! Plus it looks amazing and unique. The whole project has been worth it. We did wait several more months to replace the back door, but again, it made a world of difference. It's solid, secure, airtight, and we even included a little sidelight due to the size, but it helps to have a sliver of natural light coming in when the front doors are closed.
Since this is Patrick's own space, he likes his stuff everywhere, but as long as I can do laundry and find tools in there, I don't kick up too much of a fuss. He works from home full-time, so having a climate-controlled space that he can enjoy has made all of the difference. This photo is before he moved all of his stuff back in, because now he's settled back in, full-on rat's nest style, just like he likes it (this is before we replaced the back door). No one needs to see that, but you can a bit in the video above.
How We Dealt with the Concrete Floor
One thing we didn't do is anything with the floors. Epoxying was going to cost too much, plus there is an issue of the floor absorbing moisture from below when it gets too humid and rainy. At our contractor's advice, we didn't do anything that would cause more problems down the line. So this makes it not completely climate controlled, as the floor gets cold in the winter. I was obsessed with the idea of the watery, oceanic look of epoxying, though.
We did go to Cogdill's Carpets and get an enormous remnant, Patrick's choice. He went with this red and black striped wool carpet that doesn't really match, but it also works. He filled the rest of the space around his desk with removable carpet squares, anticipating the need to replace them every so often thanks to dogs, spills, and cigarette ash.
All said and done, I think this project came out to be about $14-15k. There are a few small things I'd like to finish, such as installing an attic door to the opening in the ceiling Patrick had the crew make when I wasn't here, painting the trim around the front door, and installing a shelf above the washer and dryer to hold laundry accoutrements, but otherwise we are both very satisfied with this literal floor to ceiling renovation. I encourage everyone to say yes to accordion style garage doors instead of the boring old roll up ones.
Interested in more of our home renovations? Check out the big kitchen reno or reflooring our den.