This project was a long time coming. Remember my awesome Dad, the carpenter who helped me with my beautiful buffet and helped me recover my basement stairs? He came Friday with my mom and my sister and future brother-in-law joined Saturday to give my little one stall garage some much needed TLC.
Starting with some before pictures you can sure see how sad it really was before.
Nothing too spectacular, but it gets the job done. It has really old siding that probably needs to be re-done and had an old rusty gutter on the front. The walk in door has seen better days with no only chipped paint but two missing glass panels in the window portion of the door. The bones and the roof are in good shape though so I knew it had potential.
Here shows one of the problems I had with the garage was the fact that my nice siding on the house is tan, but the garage is just this little white building that adds nothing to curb appeal.
From the back yard it looked ok, but again there was chipping on the paint, some of the siding was a bit rotted and the weather had taken some of the color from my star decoration from the star down onto the white paint.
Not to mention the weeds that you can see there if you look closely that my awesome Mother pulled for me :).
So we went to work scraping, and scraping, and scraping. We had to tame some wild brush that had grown pretty tall on the back and my neighbor's side of the garage and Dad tore down the old gutters and ripped out old rotten siding and replaced it with some new boards. The great thing is, he used scrap boards that either he or I already had. That helped cut down on the cost of materials so much! That combined with the fact that I had the paint already from a sale like a year ago that was buy one get one free :).
Then like all good Husker fans, we took a break, went to my aunt and uncle's house for their traditional "Redneck football party" and cheered the team on to a very close (too close) win but hey I'll take it.
Regrouped and with reinforcements from my sister and bro-in-law to be, we started painting. Which, if you ask me, is the most exciting part. :)
Before I get to the after pictures, what is this post missing? Oh that's right, some inspiration pins!
Probably the biggest one is the pretty carriage hardware you see all over Pinterest and that I've pinned to my Outdoors board:
You would not believe how much of a difference this makes it's ridiculous. So when I first ordered these I got them from Walmart.com. I chose the cheapest shipping and was expecting them to arrive tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow the day AFTER labor day. Surprise though! They came like 5 days ago! I was super excited, that almost never happens that things arrive a week before they're estimated.
Ok now I'm ready to show you the after pictures :)
Here's the new and vastly improved little garage.
It's so much less boring! Plus now it really matches the house much better. It's not exact but I don't care. It needs to be completely resided someday but the budget doesn't have room for it yet, plus it still does the job of keeping my car/extra furniture/tools/garage fridge safe and sound :)
We replaced the missing glass panels too so now when I lock my garage door it actually keeps people out, and also keeps birds and wasps out. My dad had some gutter pieces already and it matches what's on the house much better than the old blue stuff.
How about that carriage hardware huh? It's my favorite part ever! So cheap and easy to give the garage a completely different look! And now from the back yard!
Doesn't it look so nice? I didn't even notice but the paint color even matches my patio furniture better.
A few other little projects from the weekend:
This little gate was made from some 2X4's that were cut down and some fencing stapled to it. This is much needed to keep my little furry friend out from behind the garage. Buster tries to get back there and bark at all the neighbor dogs. One of them lives just on the other side of that chain link fence behind the garage there. That particular fence is in really bad shape but it's not mine, so I always worried Buster would get back there and one or the other of the dogs would get to the other so I had a pallet propped there for years and it did the trick. However after nicely painting the garage, I didn't want to keep the same thing going. Enter super Dad :) He whipped this up for me like it was nothing :).
Speaking of pallet projects. Since I had one to spare, and there was a flimsy one that I had laying around Dad and I created another backyard solution. Buster started this habit of relieving himself on my air conditioner unit which of course is no bueno.
To stop this from getting any worse, we screwed both those pallets together and got them just in front of the AC unit close enough to not be in the way and protect the unit but also far enough away to still allow the proper air flow needed.
I was going for something like this pin:
We didn't have time to do that this weekend. Maybe next time but for now this works:
So one last look at the cub appeal improvement :)
What did you guys do this weekend? I got lots of blisters from so much painting!
