EricB
Active Member
Alright, I thought I'd show you guys why I don't ever seem to post any projects. 
Apologies in advance for the crappy cell-phone photos. Right now I'm working on my garage, getting it up to snuff to use as a shop. When I bought my house the garage had a couple of incandescent bulbs and a couple of 110 outlets run by one shitty old cable buried under the ground coming from a single breaker. The walls were covered in stained plywood (the kind that if it sets on fire it burns like CRAZY) and filled with leftover building materials (paper, ceiling tiles, bits of wood and plywood, etc). There was a gas-line that had been disconnected in the house, and an old leaky bit of b-vent where an old floor-mounted heater would have been. There was also one big uninsulated window, a broken garage-door opener (the plastic gear stripped out) a work bench made by putting a solid-core door on top of a couple of falling-apart old kitchen cabinets, a damaged and pieced together overhead door, a man-door that didn't like to close...
It was a mess. Not to mention that the structure itself was a mess as well. The garage was built out of scraps that hadn't been used on other build-sites (The PO was the original owner, and built several houses in the area) including big rough-hewn beams that didn't make it across the span of the garage, so they were held together by single pieces of non-dimensional wood, old cribbing-material as studs and in the roof, and all kinds of random bits of split, broken, non-dimensional wood as the bracing in the ceiling. This would not do at all.
Notice how out of square the one beam is here, and it's two parts are held together by nothing but that little scrap of wood at the bottom of the picture:
So a couple of years ago I started to tear into it. Even now the further I get into this garage project the more astounded I am at the fact that it has stayed standing all these years. It all started by tearing everything off of and out of the walls and ceiling, and then shutting off the breaker to the garage. Ripping everything out meant that I had a few VERY overloaded trips to the dump in my future...
After that it was time to dig myself a 4' deep, 47' long trench and cut out some concrete. I had decided to rent a mini-excavator to dig with, but my plumber buddy said that was silly and sharpened a shovel... He got about 1/3 of it done in a single day, which was damn impressive! But the hardest digging was yet to come (Deeper, narrower, and through clay)
Getting inspected by the pups:
I haven't had to dig like that since the army. Thankfully my brother came by to lend a hand:
Turns out that I got some bad info from the permit office, I only needed to be 2' down. That would have been nice to know. I also only needed 2" of sand above and below my cable, not the 6" they told me to put in, so now I have quite a lot of extra dirt. Anyone need some top-soil?
Apologies in advance for the crappy cell-phone photos. Right now I'm working on my garage, getting it up to snuff to use as a shop. When I bought my house the garage had a couple of incandescent bulbs and a couple of 110 outlets run by one shitty old cable buried under the ground coming from a single breaker. The walls were covered in stained plywood (the kind that if it sets on fire it burns like CRAZY) and filled with leftover building materials (paper, ceiling tiles, bits of wood and plywood, etc). There was a gas-line that had been disconnected in the house, and an old leaky bit of b-vent where an old floor-mounted heater would have been. There was also one big uninsulated window, a broken garage-door opener (the plastic gear stripped out) a work bench made by putting a solid-core door on top of a couple of falling-apart old kitchen cabinets, a damaged and pieced together overhead door, a man-door that didn't like to close...
It was a mess. Not to mention that the structure itself was a mess as well. The garage was built out of scraps that hadn't been used on other build-sites (The PO was the original owner, and built several houses in the area) including big rough-hewn beams that didn't make it across the span of the garage, so they were held together by single pieces of non-dimensional wood, old cribbing-material as studs and in the roof, and all kinds of random bits of split, broken, non-dimensional wood as the bracing in the ceiling. This would not do at all.
Notice how out of square the one beam is here, and it's two parts are held together by nothing but that little scrap of wood at the bottom of the picture:
So a couple of years ago I started to tear into it. Even now the further I get into this garage project the more astounded I am at the fact that it has stayed standing all these years. It all started by tearing everything off of and out of the walls and ceiling, and then shutting off the breaker to the garage. Ripping everything out meant that I had a few VERY overloaded trips to the dump in my future...
After that it was time to dig myself a 4' deep, 47' long trench and cut out some concrete. I had decided to rent a mini-excavator to dig with, but my plumber buddy said that was silly and sharpened a shovel... He got about 1/3 of it done in a single day, which was damn impressive! But the hardest digging was yet to come (Deeper, narrower, and through clay)
Getting inspected by the pups:
I haven't had to dig like that since the army. Thankfully my brother came by to lend a hand:
Turns out that I got some bad info from the permit office, I only needed to be 2' down. That would have been nice to know. I also only needed 2" of sand above and below my cable, not the 6" they told me to put in, so now I have quite a lot of extra dirt. Anyone need some top-soil?
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