A plan for the garage

A plan for refurbishing the garage

My house came with an ancient wood and brick garage. It’s old. Really old. You can see it in ariel photographs from the early fifties. It has during its life been used as a home office complete with plastering and coving. It still bares the scars from this where the partition wall was taken down. It also has some very rude graffiti decorating the walls. In heavy rain it floods. It’s not very secure. The main doors are rotten and the side window is glazed with perspex. A couple of the boards are broken on the back. The guttering is coming off one side because the barge board is rotten. The roof felt is hanging down in one corner and there’s Ivy coming through the roof tiles. I don’t think the roof tiles are original. But they may be.

I’ve already made a few improvements. The side door had been kicked in and I didn’t have the key. The outside light had also been vandalised. I had the door repaired and the new outside light fitted. The interior light was really old so I had this replaced with a low energy model.

The garage was packed to the rafters with stuff from the my old garage. I’ve sold a lot of this including a metal planter, spare wall tiles left by the previous owners, the old mower and some tools. Also sold three of the big storage crates I used to move. I need to unpack and sell the remaining three. I bought with me nine bags of wood. This was wood by ex husband chopped up. Unfortunately most of it was varnished or painted and not suitable for burning on the log burner, so I slowly took it to the dump.

I also got rid of a lot of decrepit off cuts and building materials which left in the loft void by the previous owners. Useful things they left included copious amounts of paint, twenty four brand new chrome power points, nine new spot lights, an axe, a golf club and some metal letters. I also sold the 40kg of smokeless coal they left only to later discover my log burner is in fact a multi-fuel burner. A costly mistake but at least it freed up some space.

But that’s all I’ve done really. I inherited some racking and a peg board from the previous owners. I need to organise this properly and put in my tools on it. But really I need to get to grips with refurbishing the garage, in particular the roof before it deteriorates further or blows the electrics.

I’ve already hung some festoon lights on the front but I want to get a weather vane to go the back. I managed to find an old refurbished one of eBay. I didn’t like the modern looking one. This is for two purposes. First it will add some interest to a boring part of the garden behind the garage. This is where I have planted my wall flowers but they won’t flower until next year. More importantly I am hoping to scare away the pigeons that roost on the roof and crap all over my log store. Apparently they are quite hard to scare away. So we will see.

I had the plum (or greengage?) tree pruned so that I can get the roof garage roof repaired and reduce the mess from the sticky fruits when they drop (and the accompanying wasps). This has let light flood into the courtyard.

I cleared all the sticky fruit out of the gutters before it rains. The down pipe is already blocked with detritus. Sometimes I feel daunted by the amount of maintenance and repairs this place needs. But I carry on.