The Solace Room

This is the inside of our garage. It will soon be a space for escaping and relaxing. Use your imagination and follow our progress. First, you should know about the state of the garage before construction began. All four walls were wrapped in floor to ceiling storage. The rafters also were filled with at least one level of boxes and sometimes more depending on the height of the roof. We don't have a basement and in 780 square feet, there is no extra space in the house for storage. Actually, we store half of our kitchen in the garage as well. SO...when we made the decision to finish one half of the garage as a guest room/escape room, we realized that we will have to make some big decisions about storage.

Rodney spent several weeks of free time packing, re-organizing, moving and cleaning the garage. It included moving the workshop space to the other end of the garage. Now we don't have access to most stuff but we are so excited for this new space, we'll figure something out.

Our neighbor, Bill, is a contractor/handyman so he has agreed to take on this project. This first picture is the interior framing. We decided to loft the ceiling to make the space feel even bigger.



Rodney found a window and door from the construction salvage company, 2nd Use. They recycle building materials and you can get great deals on perfectly good pieces. The door is full glass in hopes of bringing as much light into the space as possible.
Lucy goes out and visits Bill and helps Daddy in the evenings. She knows she has to use her boots but she brings her tools and does some "fixing" and "banging".
At one point, Bill told us the wiring that was already in the garage was not really up to code. SO...Friday, we had a laborer out in the yard digging a two foot deep by 1 foot wide trench from the house to the garage. Most of it was along the fence and not disruptive. Tino was great with the project and gently moved our wood chips and sod and even moved a couple plants for me. I did have to lose my strawberry bed but Tino put the whole yard back together without any sign of disruption. He even trimmed out my garden and tilled it with Rodney's suggestion. Seriously...I have a pretty amazing husband!
Lucy loved this giant pile!. Those pants were mighty dirty after she slid down the hill over and over. The boots will never be the same. I feel like we keep dumping them and yet, there is still more dirt in there.

The only minor misshap we had was after Bill and Rodney decided to take advantage of the trench and toss a water line into the hole before burrying it. This way, we can have irrigation for the gardens but even potentially plumbing to the garage. We had a spiget at the house that had been leaking and Rodney decided to take advantage of the moment and switch it out while hooking up the new water line. Unfortunately, the old pipe busted on the wrong side of the valve and began spraying water into the crawl space right at a bunch of the boxes and stuff we tossed down there from the garage. Lucy and I were in the house and kept seeing Rodney running back and forth from the backyard to the front yard.

What we found out later was that Rodney ran to the front yard to turn off the main water valve. It is a rod sticking out of the ground within a cement ring. Rodney had to move some wood chips to discover that the cement ring was full of rocks and dirt that had been packed in by the rain. Now...rocks don't just appear there. It was pretty clear that our little "rockhound" and "dirt digger" had filled the space at some point. In the intensity of the moment while water was pouring into the crawl space, Rodney was trying to dig the rocks and dirt out with his fingers.

We laughed about this all later. We were really grateful for Bill and his plumbing tools after that as well. It was a busy day, and Lucy was thrilled with all the activity in the yard and the extra people to chat with at lunch. A couple weeks from now we should have a finished space. Just in time for a new baby to arrive and crowd the house. We are really looking forward to having a little quiet space available for respite.