2000: Garage & Diningroom

Continued from Garage 1 and 2

The goal of the Great Remodeling Project was to add a diningroom to our house. We began by building a garage and sealing off the old garage door. Though we'd been working steadily (on weekends only) for nearly three months, we were anxious to get started on the diningroom.

But it was not to be. I wanted the diningroom to face the backyard and the pool. But the back of the old garage was a laundryroom. We were going to have to move that to the far corner of the old garage first, to clear a space for the diningroom.

Furthermore, the old laundryroom was too small to simply be converted to a diningroom. We were going to have to take down the interior walls of the old garage and put them back up to create a large enough space for the diningroom and a small laundryroom.

One fateful Saturday morning (while Craig was still finishing the gables and eaves of the garage), I very tentatively took a few practice swings with a crowbar. I couldn't believe what I was about to do. I had cleared everything out of the workshop where the new laundryroom was going to be.

I thunked the sheetrock on the bare wall, hardly denting it. I hit it harder, and this time it broke. I inserted the end of the crowbar, braced it against a joist and pried. The sheetrock popped loose.

Soon I was whacking and pulling ferociously - - who knew you could have this much fun with a crowbar? At the end of the day I had a growing pile of shattered sheetrock, and I was looking right through the wall.

The next day I started prying out nails and knocking out two-by-fours. This hilarity continued for a month. I did almost all of it myself. We had an open, gutted space and a huge pile of rubbish in the front yard. I had ripped off the sheetrock on all the outside walls and pulled down the ceiling for good measure. NOW we would build a diningroom.

Well, not quite yet. For in the diningroom-to-be, there was...a washer and dryer. Plugged into 220-volt electrical outlets and connected to hot and cold water pipes AND drains AND vents. Did I mention the hot water heater, also plugged into a 220-volt outlet and fed by a water line and protected by an emergency drain?

You must be asking yourself, didn't they ever think ahead at ALL? I did, all the time. I just underestimated everything, or maybe I was in denial a lot. Whatever, moving the laundryroom was a nightmare. Building a new wall was the least of it.

The wiring was not so bad, because we had an electrician do it in a single day (though it did require us to figure out what we needed in both the diningroom and the laundryroom so we could get it all done at once).

The "new diningroom" was at first a dark place of bare wood and copper pipes.

The worst thing was the plumbing. We are on a slab, remember. Our laundryroom was built on the major water manifold for the whole house. This was where the pipes emerged from the slab. We ran copper pipes through the wall in an ell from the old laundryroom to the new one.

Craig did it all himself, and I think he must have soldered more than a hundred joints, and of course we had no running water all day. It was the most miserable day ever, rivaled only by the day we built the greenhouse. We went to bed exhausted. When I got up the next morning I heard a funny sound. We had a leak.

Off went the water again, and out came the soldering iron. At one point the torch set a two-by-four on fire in the wall. It was just a tiny flame, extinguished on the spot, but still. By Sunday's end, however, there were no leaks.

All week, we nervously fingered the pipes, looking for moisture, and arguing over whether a drop of water was a leak or condensation. It held. But I resolved to build the walls with screw-on panels for ready access. I sleep better that way.

The next weekend, Craig installed PVC pipe drains. I don't know how it is that he can do all these things, but he can. He does most of these jobs as well as the most accomplished tradesman. He really is amazing. We hooked up the washer and dryer. We were back in business, and NOW we would build a diningroom.

We build a diningroom