jollygreengiant
Well-known member
Spring 2025 update:
Well this thread has certainly morphed into a lot more than I ever expected. I thought I'd edit this to add some clarity and timeline of events past and planned.
-The first few pages are of restoring and getting the old schoolhouse watertight.
-After this, the focus has shifted to the house and the eventual garage addition. I have a lot of work to do here and I'm doing most of it myself
-As of 2025 the schoolhouse is mostly finished externally, but the interior finishing is on hold until the work on the house is done, and that's going to be a few years at the rate that I work at. The exterior of the house and the garage addition are done, and now I'm moving on to the internal work.
But there's lots of random and interesting (I think anyways) projects going on in between. It seems there is enough interest in the happenings on a small country property that I'll try and keep posting what I'm up to that's somewhat shop/garage/tools related.
Thanks for reading!
Original below:
Thought it best to start a thread about this project. Going to be lots of work to do and maybe someone else will find it interesting. That, and I finally have a workshop space and I want to show it off a bit.
Some backstory. After looking for a long time for a house with some land, we finally found a fixer upper in our budget range. The house itself is in decent shape (it needs updating and an addition) but the future workshop is in desperate need of help.
It started out as a one room schoolhouse, and from what we can tell was built in 1870. It was a school up until 1970 when it was sold to the previous owner, who's estate we bought it from. When it was sold in 1970 he converted the inside into a house. It stayed this way until the early 1980's when they built a modular home on the same property. After that they put a sliding door on the front corner of the schoolhouse and it was used as a workshop for his semi trucks. The rest of the building was used as a dumping ground, and as the previous owners health declined they didn't maintain it at all. Needless to say 40 years of neglect has taken its toll.
That prings us to the present. When we toured the property before buying it the schoolhouse was roped off and we were told not to enter it. So we bought the property under the assumption we would be tearing down the schoolhouse. But after having a look inside, it looked like the structure was still fairly solid. So we decided we would try and save the building, both for the historical aspect and because building new is out of our budget. So begins the biggest project I've ever done.
I'll post pics of what we've done so far and try and keep this updated as we go. Thanks for reading!
Well this thread has certainly morphed into a lot more than I ever expected. I thought I'd edit this to add some clarity and timeline of events past and planned.
-The first few pages are of restoring and getting the old schoolhouse watertight.
-After this, the focus has shifted to the house and the eventual garage addition. I have a lot of work to do here and I'm doing most of it myself
-As of 2025 the schoolhouse is mostly finished externally, but the interior finishing is on hold until the work on the house is done, and that's going to be a few years at the rate that I work at. The exterior of the house and the garage addition are done, and now I'm moving on to the internal work.
But there's lots of random and interesting (I think anyways) projects going on in between. It seems there is enough interest in the happenings on a small country property that I'll try and keep posting what I'm up to that's somewhat shop/garage/tools related.
Thanks for reading!
Original below:
Thought it best to start a thread about this project. Going to be lots of work to do and maybe someone else will find it interesting. That, and I finally have a workshop space and I want to show it off a bit.
Some backstory. After looking for a long time for a house with some land, we finally found a fixer upper in our budget range. The house itself is in decent shape (it needs updating and an addition) but the future workshop is in desperate need of help.
It started out as a one room schoolhouse, and from what we can tell was built in 1870. It was a school up until 1970 when it was sold to the previous owner, who's estate we bought it from. When it was sold in 1970 he converted the inside into a house. It stayed this way until the early 1980's when they built a modular home on the same property. After that they put a sliding door on the front corner of the schoolhouse and it was used as a workshop for his semi trucks. The rest of the building was used as a dumping ground, and as the previous owners health declined they didn't maintain it at all. Needless to say 40 years of neglect has taken its toll.
That prings us to the present. When we toured the property before buying it the schoolhouse was roped off and we were told not to enter it. So we bought the property under the assumption we would be tearing down the schoolhouse. But after having a look inside, it looked like the structure was still fairly solid. So we decided we would try and save the building, both for the historical aspect and because building new is out of our budget. So begins the biggest project I've ever done.
I'll post pics of what we've done so far and try and keep this updated as we go. Thanks for reading!
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