Garage project #1: moving day and demo

We are absolutely loving our new setup!  Benefit #1 – we can BOTH park in the garage! No more “could you move your car?” every day.  Benefit #2 – Mr. B works upstairs when he’s in town, leaving the house peacefully quiet.  That said, it was ultimately a very l o o o o n n g project with many hiccups along the way.

Here you can see the outline for the pool and how our backyard used to look. I tried replanting them, but ultimately because of the construction, I had to give up my mandevilla on the garage wall.

We broke ground on the pool right around the same time as we demolished the garage. We began work in August of last year (really, it was months before that with all the drawings, paperwork, city and neighborhood permits…).

Day 1: Put garage items in storage and prepare for demolition.  Before doing that, we had to reroute the electrical panel that was in the back of the garage.  They had to bury the cables under part of our driveway.  Thus began the influx of contractors treating our home as a construction site, leaving coke cans and trash everywhere.  You can already see that they threw dirt over some of my plants.  They were banging all day, playing loud music, and even putting holes in our living room walls without asking us.  Fun times.

Since he no longer lives there, I can probably safely share that we lived next door to Arian Foster of the Houston Texans for about a year. He was moving to Miami when we were packing the storage unit, so we were twinsies!

I rented one of those storage containers that they bring over and leave in front of your house for you to fill up. When ready, they take it and store it in a facility somewhere.  I figured we’d have it back in 3 months.

I have used a local company, Muscles for Hire, many times during our moves and have always been more than happy with them.  The 3 guys who came to help us empty our garage were awesome.  They tried to move things across the broken driveway, through the mud, but ended up doing most things through the house to our storage unit out front.

I had the guys move our enormous treadmill out of the master bedroom and into the storage unit because I thought I’d be putting it in the upstairs office once it was built.  The original installers actually built it in my bedroom, so these guys had to disassemble it partly in order to get it through the doorway.

Moving in August is exhausting!

I made a trip to the toxic waste recycling center with all this old paint.

It’s never a good surprise when you have holes in your wall you didn’t put there yourself.

This is our precious internet cable. Since it was attached to the garage, we had to do something with it!

The last step before demo was to remove the breezeway cover connecting the house to the garage.  It was interesting to watch them work.  We found old phone lines too.

Ready for demo!

Finally, the City came to deliver a storage container that lived in our driveway for months.  The way they left it, our driveway gate could not be closed.  Thanks a lot.

Next… destruction photos.

I don’t remember what I was originally expecting, but it took quite a while to take down the existing garage structure.  Once that was complete, they had to remove the concrete foundation slab, which turned out to be unnecessary because it was 18″ thick! If we had known that, they could have left it.

They started with a jackhammer, escalated to an extention on that excavator, and ultimately had to bring in some sort of machine that dropped a large boulder from high up to try to break up the foundation.  It took about 1.5 weeks for all that to happen.

And all the while, we are trying to make sure nobody touches that internet cable dangling in the air. 🙂

In case you’re wondering how we got from this to that very first picture of the finished product, come back for the next post.  Thanks for reading!