Between April 4 and 12 of 2009 we embarked on an epic journey that would take months to complete. We decided to rip down the old garage and rebuild it with a new one. It sounded easy at the beginning, but as the months wore on, those opinions changed.
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| April 2009 - The original garage. |
Smashing Stuff is Easy - Building New Stuff Is Harder
The roof of the old garage was sagging in the middle. The old garage wasn't heated. The old garage wasn't insulated. The old garage had a dirt and gravel floor. The old garage wasn't lockable. The back of the old garage was rotting away. In the words of the old next door neighbor: "I saw rats dancing on your garage window sill". In short, the old garage was a piece of crap and tickets to the rat show weren't paying the bills.
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| April 2009 - The garbage bin arrives. |
I called Bin There Dump That and they promptly dropped off a garbage bin, which we used to put all of the demolition debris in. First thing to do was rip off the garage doors, then take out the windows (without smashing the glass), then peel off the old shingles from the roof. After that, the second thing to do was to take a break.
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| April 2009 - Doors out. Windows and roof gone. I need a break. |
Lashauna was helping but this was a hard job. We needed some backup. Aaron and Cathy Whitman dropped by, followed shortly after by Jay McCurdy, who's always up for ripping things up. He brought his son, but I didn't expect much work from him since he was confined to a stroller.
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| April 2009 - Aaron supervises while Jay and Joe try to pull a wall over. |
We slaved away most of the day. Soon we were done and there was nothing left to do except pose for the camera atop the crumpled remains of the rat theatre. Lovely. Oh right, I've got to get all that debris in the garbage bin. Time for another break.
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| April 2009 - Wreaking Team 1 - Garage 0. |
The biggest achievement of the whole thing, besides that no one fell off the roof and got hurt, was that the entire 2 bay garage fit inside the garbage bin. I packed it well since I am cheap and didn't want to pay for the bin again. I wonder if it fell out of the bin in a nice neat cube when it was taken to the dump? I hope it did and the dump workers cursed the cheap guy who packed it into a giant 3D puzzle. Not that I hate dump workers, I just think that would have been funny to see.
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| April 2009 - 2 bay garage in one bin. Wreaking Team 2 - Garage 0. |
The Big Dig
Now that the wreaking was done, it was time for real work. I decided that I wanted my garage powered so I could run a heater, lights and some power outlets for tools. To make this neat and tidy, I decided to install my electrical underground from my house to my garage. It was time to dig a trench.
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| May 2009 - Luckily a mini-excavator did all of this work. |
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The guy across the street had a mini-excavator and I hired him to do some digging. In a few hours he had a nice 1 foot wide trench dug down to bedrock. He brought me some sand and I installed two runs of conduit side by side from the foundation of my house out to where the concrete slab for the new garage would be.
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| May 2009 - Loose fit and install pull lines through each section of conduit before you glue it together. Once you apply glue and join each section of conduit, you only have a few seconds before the glue hardens permanently. |
Once that was done I put the sand in the trench around the conduits and compacted it with a vibrating plate tamper that I rented from Home Depot. Next up was to put wood planks above the sand with caution tape stapled to the top of the planks. This would protect the conduit from errant digging in the future and warn people that there was live electrical conduit buried in the ground.
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| May 2009 - Electrical trench with sand and wood planks installed. |
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| May 2009 - Conduits turned up and capped so they can be installed through the concrete slab. |
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The last thing to do was push all the dirt back into the trench and smooth it off. The neighbour across the street came back with his mini-excavator and made quick work of that.
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| May 2009 - Trench covered over and smoothed off with the mini-excavator. |
