It's about time I chronicled my recent garage project since my STi was the driving force behind it.

When I bought my house 9 years ago it had only one flaw - the garage was way too small. A couple of years into it, I knocked down a demiser wall between the "laundry" and the rest of the garage and this allowed me to finally park my truck in the garage. After I bought my 02 WRX wagon, it took up residence in there along with my 45 jeep. I had an awesome workbench that was 14' long and made of unistrut and plate steel worksurfaces. But it was still cramped and I always needed to back the car out to work on it. I spent so much time modding my WRX and then the STi that I was getting sick and tired of laying on my back and setting up jackstands.

A two post lift was out of the question since my master bedroom is right above the garage. That was, unless I added on next to the garage.

So I schemed for a while and developed a budget. About this time last year I got serious and contacted a design firm to draw up the plans. After a couple of revisions, we ended up with this:

Existing first floor floorplan:



Planned first floor floorplan:

 

So basically, I extended the existing garage 9’ to the south, increasing it’s depth; and I connected a 33’x15’ (with a planned 12’ ceiling) garage to it on the west side.

Now, I am a married man, and I’m sure other married i-clubbers are asking themselves, “how the hell did your wife let you get away with this?” The answer to that is a technique that has worked throughout the ages: BRIBERY. Since the garage moved out 9’ to the south and the second story was above it, I extended it 9’ as well. This created a nice “L” shaped master closet, more than doubling our closet space and making it roughly 200 sqft. . She also got the promise of a new pantry, washer, dryer, and freezer for the garage.

Existing second floor floorplan:



Planned second floor floorplan:

 

Here are a couple of before pictures:

 

After a search for a quality contractor, I chose HF Schwartz of Eldorado Hills, CA. They got started at the end of April, 2006. But before they could get going, I had to break up an old parking pad next to my existing garage, tear down some fencing, and do a rough cut on the yard.

 

Here is the mess of concrete once I moved it out to the driveway to be hauled off (the driveway would get broken up later by my contractor):

 

I also had to relocate my gas meter since it sat against the existing garage right where the addition would be going. I also rerouted the water main and sprinkler lines since they were running right under the new foundation.

 

With the lines out of the way, the real construction could start - or so I thought. The arborist decided that a couple of my oaks were going to be problems, so out they came. We had to pull the stumps so we could backfill and compact and that took an act of god/large excavator.

 

A nice clean start:

 

So now we could finally begin "real" construction:

Forms:



Foundation poured and walls started:

 

Slab poured along with final footing:

 

More wall work:

 

The beginnings of the roof. My pitch was some oddball 3.7/12 thing so I ended up with 13' high ceilings. It's about a foot more than I need for the lift, but I am not complaining:

 

Some more work:

 

So there was a bit of an oddity in the design. As you can see from the pics above, the very front of the west addition is gabled and the rear is an extension of the main house gable. Well, I decided to rafter off the slope and use the attic space I created for storage. It will also make the drywaller's ceiling much easier to install (not to mention the lighting).

 

The sub-roof is starting to go in. We haven't been able to put up a lot of siding because it would hide a lot of the connectors that have to be inspected.