Dream House - Garage

As is par for the course I completely forgot to take a true "before" picture when we started our garage makeover. *sigh* You'd think one of these times I would remember, but apparently this was not it. In any case I do have a picture of what the garage looked like when we did our inspection. To be honest this is as good of a before picture as any...this just isn't our junk! 

The door opens into the mudroom which I will reveal tomorrow...spoiler alert, there are no before pictures of that either! 

Our house in MA was a perfect starter home in that it didn't need a lot of work, just a lot of updating. We painted and got our feet wet for slightly bigger projects like replacing electrical fixtures and tiling the kitchen. When I told Dingle that I would really love to have a deck in the garage I think his exact words were something like, "well, we've never done that before." "That" of course being really building anything from scratch, you know, like out of wood. We took measurements and priced out the project (in the end the materials cost us about 200 dollars including paint). Before sending him to the hardware store we watched a This Old House episode on how to build a small deck. I am not kidding, that was the entirety of our education. 

We got this!

First we removed the old stairs and saved them to reattach to the new deck. Next we built the frame and added the joists and brackets. Matt made all of the cuts, I wielded the hammer. A boy in a pair of butterfly wings acted as our site manager. 

After the first day of construction we had the entire deck built and all that was left to do was add the railing and attach the decking. 

I'm pretty sure it was at this point that I realized that the new deck was going to look so beautiful and the rest of the garage looked terrible. Obviously, I would need to paint the walls that surround the deck. And if I was going to paint the walls surrounding the deck then we should probably build a bench on the deck...and paint that as well. 

Oh hey...those wall surrounding the deck look amazing! Look how terrible the rest of garage looks!! Better paint those too...

Let's finish this project! Hang some hooks, organize the rest of the garage, and have a beer! 

So it's finally finished...well almost, I still need something for the wall to the right of the door (damn you last 2%, haha). It is SO nice. Now the kids have a place to take off their coats and kick off their muddy shoes. Dingle did an amazing job making my vision a reality. Of all the projects we have done, this one might be favorite!