SHawkins87
Member
Hello all, I have been looking forward to sharing my project with you for a good while now. I have a bit of a story to tell and lots of photos that I will be posting in the days to come.
This project originally started a little over 20 years ago. My young bride and I had found the property that we wanted to build our home on and raise our future family. At the time there was no way we could afford to both purchase the property and build our dream home. We were anxious to stop wasting our money on rent but did not want to settle for building a home on the property that we would not be happy with long term.
We settled on a plan to build the garage with an apartment above it. We would live in the apartment while we paid off the property and saved money to build our dream home. Here is the front elevation of the original building that we designed.
The land that we purchased is a small farm parcel in western Scott County, Kentucky. The building was designed with the idea that when we built our dream home in the future this building would look at home behind it and not look like any old garage with living quarters above it.
My wife and I designed this building ourselves. We also completed nearly all of the construction ourselves with the help of family and friends. The only items that were contracted out were the concrete, roof, and HVAC.
At the time we were in our very early twenties and our inexperience in some of the areas of construction would come back to bite us later. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything and would do it all again if I had the chance.
Twenty one years later we have that future family in the form of a nine year old daughter, an eleven year old son, and an eighteen year old cat. We lived in the apartment over the garage for nine years before we moved into that dream home we had been planning all that time.
We thought that we would rent the apartment out to generate some extra income. As luck would have it, we had a bad experience with our first renter. We decided then that maybe the rental business was not for us. We never made repairs to the apartment and just utilized the garage portion of the building.
The original building had started to show its age. Our material selections and inexperience in construction had accelerated the aging process. Something had to be done so we re-imagined the whole project.
Over the past year and a half we have stripped it, gutted it, and added onto it. We built a separate RV shed with full hook-ups for our camper and added a few other surprises you will see as we go along.
I hope you will find my story interesting and will follow along as I document our progress.
Scott
This project originally started a little over 20 years ago. My young bride and I had found the property that we wanted to build our home on and raise our future family. At the time there was no way we could afford to both purchase the property and build our dream home. We were anxious to stop wasting our money on rent but did not want to settle for building a home on the property that we would not be happy with long term.
We settled on a plan to build the garage with an apartment above it. We would live in the apartment while we paid off the property and saved money to build our dream home. Here is the front elevation of the original building that we designed.
The land that we purchased is a small farm parcel in western Scott County, Kentucky. The building was designed with the idea that when we built our dream home in the future this building would look at home behind it and not look like any old garage with living quarters above it.
My wife and I designed this building ourselves. We also completed nearly all of the construction ourselves with the help of family and friends. The only items that were contracted out were the concrete, roof, and HVAC.
At the time we were in our very early twenties and our inexperience in some of the areas of construction would come back to bite us later. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything and would do it all again if I had the chance.
Twenty one years later we have that future family in the form of a nine year old daughter, an eleven year old son, and an eighteen year old cat. We lived in the apartment over the garage for nine years before we moved into that dream home we had been planning all that time.
We thought that we would rent the apartment out to generate some extra income. As luck would have it, we had a bad experience with our first renter. We decided then that maybe the rental business was not for us. We never made repairs to the apartment and just utilized the garage portion of the building.
The original building had started to show its age. Our material selections and inexperience in construction had accelerated the aging process. Something had to be done so we re-imagined the whole project.
Over the past year and a half we have stripped it, gutted it, and added onto it. We built a separate RV shed with full hook-ups for our camper and added a few other surprises you will see as we go along.
I hope you will find my story interesting and will follow along as I document our progress.
Scott
, welcome to GJ.
