Goodbye Attached Garage, Hello She Shed!!!

 On to our next project----

THE BIG ONE!!!

SOOOOO what is the big one?

It's my She Shed!!!

We are converting the single attached garage into a "She Shed" for my weaving looms, quilting frame, and an area with our patio furniture that will be like a sun porch and mudroom space. This is our basic sketch to utilize the space to it's best features, as well as look out at our big backyard while we are in the She Shed.  (yes, Steve can come in my She Shed and hang out in the Sun Room area) ....

We have this amazing view out the back over our 2.5 acres ... 

Our house only has two small windows in the kitchen 

 and one bathroom window that look out to the east.

The view is being "wasted" and not enjoyed.

Four tall floor to ceiling french door type windows will face out the East side of the room.

This will be the main view out of them. Ahhhhhhhh 

We get a lot of wildlife, including deer, turkeys, cranes, foxes 

and a lot of birds at our feeders.

On the opposite wall, 

we will have 3 new windows facing west 

in place of the garage door too.

Through the magic of photoshop, here is what we are proposing.

We started drawing up our plans and got the proper building permit filed. Everything must be done up to code of course. Steve and I poured over ideas and plans and made our cut list and decided to start shopping for materials as each sale came about.

We have just about everything stockpiled right now to get this room going, so it was finally time to start.  The attached garage and mud room are about 24 x 20.  It will be a great space to put all of my fiber toys, as well as our front porch furniture in an area designated as a sun room.

~~~~~~~~

Our first step was to reinforce the roof/ceiling on back side where there was a sag. Steve needed to construct a support beam and some headers of 2 by 12's, three boards thick. He was fortunate to find someone who was tearing down a building and was selling a whole stack of them for $100. Now he had enough for the beam as well as headers over the windows and doors too.

With the help of our son-in-law's father Gaylen, they jacked up the roof rafters, put in a temp wall, and then got the big 3 layer thick beam into place. Now the roof is supported correctly and level.

The next step was to install a side entry door for access back and forth to our big garage. This will be our main entry into the house from the rear into the She Shed and then up into our kitchen area inside. Company still comes in the front  door. We are going to get some little paving stones or maybe build a board walk for a walkway between the two buildings. They are only 12 feet apart.

So this added She Shed room will be somewhat of a mudroom and sunroom as well as a area for my crafts and looms and quilting machines.

I prepped the outdoor area before Steve started to cut through the doorway.  I moved some of these hostas to other parts of the yard.  Then I gave away the rest of the hostas that to a few people on Facebook Marketplace. Once I was done painting the siding, I planted a bunch of perennial seeds saved by my friend Juanita. I also planted some bulbs from my parents when they were visiting from Florida. We trimmed out the flower bed with some little paving stones that match the rest of the flower beds around the house.

Our friend John was concerned that we were cutting through asbestos siding. But no, it is real cedar wood siding. I had painted the North side of the She Shed and it really cleaned it up and looks good. The front grubby portions in this photo below will be gone soon.....

We decided to get a good quality door that has full glass from top to bottom with little grids sandwiched between the thermal panes of glass. That way we can have light coming into the room from the North side, but still have it seal up for year-round weather.

Actually, we ordered two doors, so the other one can go on the South side. That doorway leads to the doggy potty yard and additional access to the other side of our basement.  We will work on that later as it's not high priority right now.

It was exciting to cut through the cedar siding and the wall to make the opening for the door. I made a little YouTube video of my incredible hulk taking care of the procedure.

The door went into place very well and we even added a digital door lock for ease of family access. He plumbed it up, shimmed into place and reinforced the threshold. After these pics were taken, Steve trimmed it out and I painted it all to match.

Now that the door was done, the next step was to remove the single 8 by 8 garage door on the west side of the attached garage. Removing the door was easy, and Steve had a temporary wall up into place to hold everything level.

Working working working....

We took it apart piece by piece, and removed the too-small header as well the extra siding on top. The metal garage door is being re-purposed up to my brother's cottage for one of his outbuildings.  Love it that it can find a new use.

We will cover the upper portion over the windows with Smart Siding that closely matches the rest of the wood clapboard siding on the rest of the house.  New soffits and fascia are also going up.  He put the temporary wall into place and we were able to lift up the new heavier stronger header by ourselves. 

Steve had pre-made the new wall to go in the place of the 8x8 garage door.  It has access for the three windows that will be facing to the West. What three windows, you ask? 

We had been wandering in the local home supply store and found three windows that someone had special ordered and cancel the order. They were very nice high quality windows at a real discount of almost 50% off. It turned out they were exactly the size that we needed to do three windows across that opening!! Of course, they had them marked down because the order had been cancelled from the original price. We took the time to find a manager and ask if we took all three of the windows, could we save any additional costs? He knocked an additional $25 off each window so we would take all three! Score!!!

This morning, I helped Steve put the permanent wall into place and he removed the temporary wall. The studs and the big header are all in to support the roof line properly.

Man oh man that ceiling soars up to 11 feet high!!!!

As I draft this blog, he is working on the exterior OSB board for above and below the windows.

We are heading out later today with the trailer and the Tracker to go pick up the matching Smart Siding that is on sale this week. It's horribly hot and humid today.  The heat index is about 96 and we are not going to work on the room anymore until the sun goes down. Looks like I will have some more painting to do as soon as the humidity drops by Saturday.

Steve helped our daughter and son-in-law yesterday with the water pump on their well for their house. Also I babysat for their kids so their babysitter could leave early to go camping for the holiday weekend.

We don't like to go camping over Fourth of July because the fireworks are way too stressful on our dogs. If they are home, at least in the house, with loud music or TV playing.... it can kind of drown out the sound of anything going on in the neighborhood. Our city had fireworks last night over at the Breakwater Park but it wasn't too loud at our home. We could see them from the backyard though, which was nice.

Time to get some easy supper put together on this hot humid day. Thank goodness for central air inside of Our National Folk Farmhouse.

HAPPY FOURTH 

OF JULY