toomanyrocks
Well-known member
In 2010, after finishing the garage for my daughter and son-in law, I finally decided to start on my project.
We have lived in our home of about 25 years and having recently retired, I was really bored. I previously routinely worked 60 hour weeks and needed something to keep me out of my wife's hair. Hence the Michigan garage. See the link below for that story. (By the way did I mention that that project took about a year and it was an 8 hour drive from my house to theirs each week?)
Anyway, my project came from a couple of issues. Our house had run out of garage space basically the day we moved in. I am pretty sure that I had not parked all of the vehicles in the garage once since we moved in. (I managed to make space in the winters for my wife's small car just to prevent divorce.) But the bottom line was that I had a 5 car garage with room for maybe 1/2 a car.
The original garages were a double door with 2 car deep parking and a single door with space for 1 big car. By the time I put all the shop equipment in the garage, ( do a lot of woodworking) I had taken up 2 full spaces. I also owned an old Case 580CK backhoe from a previous property that I couldn't justify getting rid of, as it just came in handy....which with its trailer, took up all of the rest of the space in the garages except for the small spot for the wife's car. (my neighborhood frowns on having trailers parked in the yard.)
The other issue was that I never liked the layout of our kitchen, and while I was at it, didn't think the architect ever had a spouse that cooked or did laundry. Those areas were not what I would have designed....though 3 years without a kitchen, my wife was not convinced of the need. The kitchen was a long, narrow galley type that stretched along the back of the house. The stove was on an Island with a Jennair for exhaust, no overhead fan, so naturally any cooking in the kitchen was accompanied by the smoke alarm which was conveniently placed, you guessed it... in the kitchen.
The laundry was only big enough for the washer and dryer, no counter space, so laundry days had clean and dirty laundry piles scattered all over the house.
So here were the prerequisites: Bigger footprint for the kitchen, with proper exhaust and some room to entertain since cooking is the family social event, laundry room with room for sorting clothing...not on the floor...and a garage\shop that would house the wood shop, all the other trailers and leave room in the original garage to actually park cars. Plus I wanted plenty of storage, and by the way it would be nice to have a bathroom in the garage to keep the dirt out of the house. Oh, and I really wanted a lift in the garage, as I hate crawling under the vehicles...and might as well add heat to the garage, since the torpedo heater tends to burn my ankles and just takes too long to heat up a large space.
All that said, we thought about it for 6 months or so, sis a lot of preliminary sketches and figured that it would have to be done in 2 parts, the kitchen first and then the garage, as our lot is narrow enough that the garage would block access to the kitchen part of the project...so kitchen first.
My previous project:
My Michigan garage build
We have lived in our home of about 25 years and having recently retired, I was really bored. I previously routinely worked 60 hour weeks and needed something to keep me out of my wife's hair. Hence the Michigan garage. See the link below for that story. (By the way did I mention that that project took about a year and it was an 8 hour drive from my house to theirs each week?)
Anyway, my project came from a couple of issues. Our house had run out of garage space basically the day we moved in. I am pretty sure that I had not parked all of the vehicles in the garage once since we moved in. (I managed to make space in the winters for my wife's small car just to prevent divorce.) But the bottom line was that I had a 5 car garage with room for maybe 1/2 a car.
The original garages were a double door with 2 car deep parking and a single door with space for 1 big car. By the time I put all the shop equipment in the garage, ( do a lot of woodworking) I had taken up 2 full spaces. I also owned an old Case 580CK backhoe from a previous property that I couldn't justify getting rid of, as it just came in handy....which with its trailer, took up all of the rest of the space in the garages except for the small spot for the wife's car. (my neighborhood frowns on having trailers parked in the yard.)
The other issue was that I never liked the layout of our kitchen, and while I was at it, didn't think the architect ever had a spouse that cooked or did laundry. Those areas were not what I would have designed....though 3 years without a kitchen, my wife was not convinced of the need. The kitchen was a long, narrow galley type that stretched along the back of the house. The stove was on an Island with a Jennair for exhaust, no overhead fan, so naturally any cooking in the kitchen was accompanied by the smoke alarm which was conveniently placed, you guessed it... in the kitchen.
The laundry was only big enough for the washer and dryer, no counter space, so laundry days had clean and dirty laundry piles scattered all over the house.
So here were the prerequisites: Bigger footprint for the kitchen, with proper exhaust and some room to entertain since cooking is the family social event, laundry room with room for sorting clothing...not on the floor...and a garage\shop that would house the wood shop, all the other trailers and leave room in the original garage to actually park cars. Plus I wanted plenty of storage, and by the way it would be nice to have a bathroom in the garage to keep the dirt out of the house. Oh, and I really wanted a lift in the garage, as I hate crawling under the vehicles...and might as well add heat to the garage, since the torpedo heater tends to burn my ankles and just takes too long to heat up a large space.
All that said, we thought about it for 6 months or so, sis a lot of preliminary sketches and figured that it would have to be done in 2 parts, the kitchen first and then the garage, as our lot is narrow enough that the garage would block access to the kitchen part of the project...so kitchen first.
My previous project:
My Michigan garage build
