Holy Shit, The Garage

Okay, so there is no hope of starting this post with some clever opening line because I just can’t wait to show you guys something…

WHAT.

Holy. Shit.

I just… Can we just… DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT THIS LOOKED LIKE FOUR WEEKS AGO?!

Yeah, okay, so I’m not going to pretend that this is nearly as important to anyone else as it is to me. I haven’t often talked about or posted pictures of the full garage because it stresses me out. I mean, listen, in the three years I’ve lived here, I’ve probably only been away from the farm for, what? Fifteen days? That means there are about 1200 days of my life where I walked out the back door, or drove home from work, and saw this…

Rot.

Rotted doors, rotted windows, rotted siding. Plus a lot of missing siding, or no siding, or, well, this…

That’s real. That’s what the back of the garage looked like (complete with missing garage door) when I bought this place.

If you’re wondering why the hell it took me this long to do something about it… well. Good question. I actually priced out “residing” the entire garage within the first month of living here, but the builder I talked to was going to charge me $10,000.

If your eyeballs almost fell out of your head… fair. Mine did too, especially when I was in the midst of paying for all of the plumbing to be fixed and a new roof to be put on the house. It just wasn’t financially feasible, even though it was probably a fair price for the work. (Protip: If you ever want a ballpark on what having work done on your house should cost, estimate your material cost and then double it for labor. It’s not 100% accurate–obviously any contractor will have their own way of pricing based on costs, efficiencies, and how much they want the work–but that should at least put you in the general range of what it should cost.)

Since I wasn’t going to pay $10k to re-side the garage, I did what I could. I had a new garage door installed in the shop a few years back. I did some demo myself and then begged help from one of my uncles to get the worst two sides of the garage taken care of. I painted… eventually. I definitely didn’t intend to find myself three years down the road, still staring at this shit…

There are so many things I can do without help if I don’t have the means or desire to pay for it, but it turns out that installing 10ft sheets of T1-11 is not on that list. I mean… shit. I could probably rig something up on the tractor and figure out how to get it done. It’s not impossible. It’s also probably not practical (unless I’m trying to prove a point… and honestly? It’s been a long time since anyone in my life has tried to tell me I “can’t” do something, so that’s less of a motivator these days than it has been in the past.)

So, anyway, this damn garage siding has been weighing on me for a long time, and I finally just manned-up and did that thing I hate doing…

I asked for help.

And my dad showed up with my kid brother and some of his buddies, and they helped with the demo and hauling those sheets of siding around…

Which was absolutely amazing…

And then my mom had some of her friends up to the farm last week and they helped with the painting…

And with a week off work I was able to continue to paint and get a ton of trim work done…

I love trim work.

Which brings us to this…

(Also, someone is going to comment on the “sag” in that 100 year old corn crib roof as if the world is ending… it’s not. This building is perfectly solid, if a little settled. Everyone has the right to be uptight about their own shit, but I’m not interested in anyone pulling that Chicken Little routine about my house or outbuildings. Trust me… I’m perfectly aware of what’s going on in all of my buildings from a structural standpoint, and I’ve got this shit handled.) Anyway, the progress is amazing, even though there’s still a ton of work to do before it’s finished, including painting the back side and install all the “upper” trim, corner trim, and soffit boards. I’m also considering what to do on the peak of the roof where the octagon window was… it wasn’t feasible to move the framing for the larger rectangular window I’d hoped for, so I’m considering a false “door” or possibly commissioning some ironwork from a blacksmith friend of mine… we’ll see.  That’s no small amount of work, but I’m happy to do it, because instead of driving home from work every day and seeing this… I’m gonna see this…

I’m just going to say this again because it bears repeating: Holy. Shit.