The Garage

We recently bought a new home and one thing that was a must for me was a garage. I've never had a garage in any of my homes since I moved out on my own and it was time to finally get one. Warming your car up in -40 weather, scraping windows and brushing snow off cars gets old quick especially as we usually have very long winters. So a garage was a must. We decided to build it ourselves or at least as much of it as we thought we could handle. This was probably the biggest DIY project we'll ever do.

Our garage pad came poured with the house so it was one thing we didn't need to have done. We did have it  enlarged to 22' by 22'. We made a few changes from the normal standard garage. The main being that we turned the roof so that it sloped front to back rather than side to side. I thought it would make the garage a little less imposing on our tiny back yard. With the turn of the roof we were required to install a much larger header over the garage door to support the weight of all the roof beams resting there. With that we decided to raise the height of the walls to 9 feet to accommodate the size of the header. Making the one little change of the roof caused for a lot of other changes which added to the cost of the garage. We also went with a storage loft in our trusses so we'd have lots of additional storage space for seasonal stuff.

We started our build on the May long weekend. With a lot of help from friends and family we got all four walls up and sheeted on the first weekend.

We did end up hiring a crane to put the 500 pound beam in place. We didn't want to chance it dropping on someone if we attempted to raise it ourselves.

On the second weekend we managed to get all the roof trusses up and the roof sheeted.

Construction slowed down a bit at that point. We hired someone to install the garage door and to shingle the roof. We were going to attempt the roof ourselves but its slightly on the steep side so we went with a contractor instead.

Next came the man door and window installation. We had a little trouble with our man door and had too return it twice before we got the right one.

Lastly at the end of June we ended up hiring contractors to install the facia and soffets and put the siding up. We found the peak walls just to high for us to manage. Now its nearly done, we still need to do the electrical and paint the trim.