Garage Challenge

Hello!

It is Monday again. We are in our house, just not with all of our stuff! We are sleeping on air mattresses and have "some" of our stuff. We'll get furniture & the rest in about a week.

Meanwhile, we are working on Home Improvement Projects. BEWARE: In an older home, this is dangerous ground upon which to tread! "Let's re-do the kitchen" turns into "look, the ceiling is also cracked here and into the living room: we could re-plaster and paint the whole ceiling while we're doing that." Take down the kitchen cabinets, to reveal that there is no insulation in 1/2 of it, and rotten wood beneath the siding.

We are currently living with a torn-out kitchen and master bathroom upstairs. I can use the appliances, when I choose to wipe off the thick layer of dust first. NEXT blog, I'll show you "before" and "during" photos of those.

TODAY's blog, however, is to pat ourselves on the back (well mostly Frank, but we all helped) for ONE successful project!

We start out with the garage. This seems like a strange place to start, I hear you say under your breath? Well, it would SEEM so. BUT. We need the storage space in the garage, to put camping gear, canned and boxed foods, Christmas decorations... just all around "stuff."

This garage, built in 1950, had accumulated 58 years of YUK. The cement of the walls and floor was black with oil and who knows what else. Old cabinets on the walls were mildewy and smelly. I could imagine sending a child into the garage to retrieve an item, followed by my additional instruction, "And DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE in there!" Eeeww.

So. This project takes over a week of late evenings, and a full Saturday. Frank removes smelly cabinets and other miscellaneous debris. He scrubs the cement of the floor and walls with cleansers, oil removers, etching acid--anything Home Depot has to sell, he buys to try to clean that cement. I think he scrubs the same "worst" area 3 nights in a row.

When it seems acceptable, and he thinks paint will actually stick to the now-much-cleaner cement, we use the seals-out-moisture type of paint. The kids and I paint with rollers the 1st 2 coats on the walls, and then Frank tries out his new toy, a paint sprayer, and does a final coat and the ceiling.

THEN, the floor. We have the sales guy come out from Home Depot, with his samples and pictures of the epoxy-paint-sealer you can have them put on the concrete floor. It looks really nice, lasts for years and years, and it's also quite expensive. Frank looks at all the information after the sales presentation and says, "We can do this."

I groan a little, never having done this before! But I agree to try. With step-by-step instructions, and a DVD showing the Very Happy Lady doing Very Easy Work, can we mess it up that badly?

It turns out that we do okay! Here is the final result.

Before Yukky Corner, After Yukky Corner:
Bonus: by doing it ourselves we save about $2500. Now my kids will not be afraid to go into the garage.

Happy week-before-Halloween! Love, Kari