Capture's Crappy Garage to Workshop Rehab

[Capture]

My wife and I have owned this house for almost 8 years. I've remodeled basically every room in the house at some point or another. One of the last frontiers of this little 1950's cape cod is the detached garage. It has many problems and in the last few years the neglect and poor decisions of others have started to rear their ugly head.
With the lockdown on families during this Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic I decided now is a great time to work on this dilapidated outhouse. Since we haven't parked a car in it since my wife was first pregnant over 6 years ago I got authority from my better half to make it a shop!

I've been a long time lurker and one of my favorite threads on this site is Sakurama's Mid-Century Moto Mecca Makeover - [https://www.garagejournal.com/forum...ragejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=185104). Much inspiration comes from that thread! Thanks Gregor.

I'm a photographer and have two main hobbies that will mostly occupy this 12x20 space. Woodworking is one of them and anything involving bicycles is the other. With my two boys getting on bikes now - part of this will have to revolve around two wheels. My woodshop is split into two spaces currently. Garage is power tools and the basement houses my hand tools and bench. It has been a pain to go from outside in, back and forth, etc. Not to mention I'm sure my wife would appreciate the lack or wood dust in the basement.

This garage is not only ugly but at some point someone cut a crossmember off a truss or two to fit an automatic garage door opener. That's where the problems begin. The garage has a sag in the roof line the walls bow outward and has caused the walls to rot away from water damage. The concrete floor is buckled has huge dips and cracks in the front half. Well, that's about it for now. Lets see where this little adventure takes me.

I hope you'll stop by and offer suggestions and comments as I'll most likely be needing some help and inspiration along the way.

Here is where it sits now. Over the last few days I have improved it quite substantially but I'll get into that in my next post.

 

[sakurama]

Looking forward to seeing your shop unfold. If anything can help keep our sanity right now it's our shop spaces. I find working on the shop is as cathartic as working in the shop.

Gregor

 

[bj383ss]

I'm in. You said the magic word. Woodshop. Is that a skylight on the roof or solar panel?

Bret

 

[Squashfest81]

Small shop and bikes. I’m in. Shore it up and hang some bikes.

 

[Capture]

So this is my first task - a rather large one. This wall has gone from bowed to sagging to full on rotted out over the last few years. Someone, who knows how long ago, cut out a spanning crossmember from the roof trusses to put an automatic garage door opener in. When they did that they failed to support the walls from bowing out in any way. So year after year the bow was so significant that when it would rain the wall would be the recipient of dripping water which would eventually get into the wall and rot everything. Studs, wall sheating, everything.

The bowed wall:

Inside crossmember removed and drooping (you can see it missing where florescent fixture and door opener are):

I've been eyeing this project for a couple summers and never got around to it. I'd stash stuff in the garage, mill up some lumber and close her up. Time and water working against me I decided to fix her up. The cut-out crossmember started the process of collapsing but after looking deeper I noticed the ridge of the roof sagged substantially. From the inside I could see that in the deepest part of the sag was a **** joint of the ridge line with nothing supporting it other than a sistered six inch 2x6.

Substantial 5-6" ridgeline droop:

I decided to jack up the ridge from the **** joint, pull the two walls inward, build a temp supporting wall, tear out the old rotted wall and put a new one back in. So over the last few days that's what I've been doing. Its been fun and a challenge. I'm nearly there and she's pretty straightened out.

While jacking up the old garage I've never heard so many groans and pops. Quite amazing what a bottle jack and a ratchet strap can do. I bolted up some scrap LVL to both sides of the garage in the biggest part of the wall bows. I ran a string line from point to point along the ridge on top of the garage. I would jack up the two sistered 2x4s, pick up the slack with the ratchet strap and do it all over again till the roof ridge was in line with my string. Once that was straightened out I started removing the old wall and building a new one.

It rained and snowed yesterday and after some inspection of the wall there was no dripping along the wall. Pretty straight. I'll post wall photos next.

Here's more:

Ridgeline now matches up with my string line:

Temp support wall and strap:

Pano with ridge supports and ratchet strap for the night:

Dry skin and hard surfaces dont mix: