We Build a Garage
I believe there is a very natural human survival instinct that unconsciously warns us away from fully evaluating the implications of decisions we have already made, that we will live with, but that would overwhelm us if we thought about everything we were actually going to have to go through. Without this instinct, probably no one would ever have children. (Or puppies.)
We banished the cars to the street. Craig found a crew that built a form exactly to his specifications and poured a concrete slab. It stood up like a massive island in front of the house, to avoid flooding: rain pours down our driveway in a river.
Let me tell you right now, throughout this project, which had flood-control disaster written all over it, Craig never made the slightest miscalculation. At each juncture, when rain came down in inches we would hold our breath and watch the water deepen. Every time and to this day, the water has slipped around the house exactly as Craig has planned and drained away harmlessly.
We closed the garage door and parked the cars on the new slab. No turning back now.
Over the Labor Day weekend, once again we found ourselves deep in a major project as the mercury climbed past one hundred degrees. We had a big stack of two-by-fours and a pretty sketchy plan. In four days, we framed the garage ourselves.
This was not at all like building the shed. We measured and marked and cut and pounded away for three days. Raising the walls on the fourth day was a great big, scary job, but we did it. We tied in the top rails and had to call Pat for help with the huge beam, made out of a pair of 18-foot two-by-tens, that would form the header for the new garage door. We had a frame.
No way was I going to roof this thing. We called a roofer and ordered a pile of pre-fab trusses, plywood, and a whole lot of shingles. This part wasn't all that expensive and it only took a day. Craig did a great job with the materials and the crew did good work. We were very proud of ourselves when the foreman remarked that this was the squarest frame they'd had to work with in quite a long time.
The next part was very hard: sheathing the whole thing with plywood. Plywood is heavy, unwieldy, and hateful to cut. We did this job ourselves. It was miserable, but we got it done. That left only the strange new task of covering the whole thing on the outside with Tyvec. I found this stage awkward, like wrapping an enormous Christmas present, but not difficult. We had a weatherproof building.
By now it was mid-September. We had the garage wired, installed lights, and called a garage-door guy to move the door and its opener from the old garage to the new one. This left the house with a gaping hole, but we were ready: we framed in the old garage door and covered it with Tyvek.
The new garage was now fully functional, and the old garage was now, at least technically, indoor space. But what to do with all these Tyvek walls? Craig matched our brick as closely as he could and ordered enough brick for all four walls of the garage. We were doing this whole job for a very low price, but we were determined that it would not be a cheap-looking garage.
It took us three weeks to find the right man to do the bricks. Craig talked to everybody he could find. They all wanted too much money or else they couldn't satisfy Craig that their work would be good enough.
Then one day Craig saw a beautiful limestone wall going up about half a mile from our house. A little spying turned up a lone mason. Craig approached him, and they quickly struck a deal. It was mid-October when he started. The work is beautiful.
Freshly bricked in. That's the old driveway.
The garage was just about finished. All that remained was...the soffits! Craig finished out the details with cedar, painted the woodwork gray, and mounted some little brass street numbers. Voila!
Originally, we had estimated that we'd have Thanksgiving dinner in the new diningroom, but it was now November first, and what we had was one very fine brick garage sitting in the middle of the old asphalt driveway and a Tyvek wall where the old garage door had been. What had we gotten ourselves into???
Continue: Diningroom
