One Room Challenge: Garage Exterior - Week 5

We're officially over the hump with the One Room Challenge! Progress was made across the whole structure, with the body paint being completed and the trim getting work all the way around.  I love the timeline of the One Room Challenge: each week I get a good sense of where I am with meeting achievable deadlines, and I can usually divide projects to make a lot of progress happen over the course of each week.  Then, the little things add up to the big things! 

The One Room Challenge invites designers, DIYers, homeowners, and anyone to make progress in a single space over six- or eight weeks.  This is my fourth challenge, and I am definitely hitting my goals, and working to overcome setbacks as we go.  There are so many others working on their spaces too: Check them week-by-week here! 

If you're just joining on the One Garage Project, get caught up with each week's progress: 
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

Paint

This week was all about paint!  We were hit with two things that really made big progress possible: a long weekend off school and just the right weather.  It is still unseasonably warm and dry, which is bad for the planet but good for garage painting.  I was able to get each side of the garage painted with the new body color!  

The old body color made a reappearance in the mural: Sherwin Williams Haven (6437), and I repainted the exterior in the green we landed on for the house: Sherwin Williams Clary Sage (6178).  It's perfect!  I love how much it calmed down the surrounding space, and makes the perfect backdrop for the other things we plan to do in our garden.  This color plays really well with the warm tones in the roof, and really makes the mural stand out as a feature instead of blending into the bright walls.  It's all about balance. 

Trim

Getting that painted, I was also able to get going on the trim.  I stuck with the bright white that we're using on the main house trim: Sherwin Williams Pure White (7005).  It's a great white against warm and cool tones: an essential feature with the green on the garage and colors in the mural.  It also matches the aluminum drip edge almost exactly.  Getting the rafter tails painted made the biggest difference on the look of the garage.  With both greens, this really looks sharp.  

There were a few places where I added trim as well.  In working with the window, the sill was deteriorated almost completely.  I wound up cutting away a huge part of the sill and doing a Dutchman repair: replacing it with new wood and filling other gaps with Abatron WoodEpox.  Then I got to task filling the deteriorated rafter tails in the bump out with WoodEpox. I also added a couple trim pieces along where the side walls meet the addition.  These had just been open for a long time, and adding trim helped to button these up really well.  

New Problems

Paint prep exposed a few problems.  Not that I'm surprised, but our garage is missing a foundation.  It's just wood-on-grade.  Since it's old-growth fir, the structure is in surprisingly good shape!  Any areas with deterioration really looks like it was exacerbated by critters rather than age.  I definitely don't have the budget to lift and repair this garage (and I'm not convinced it'd be a worthwhile endeavor), so we're doing the next best thing to preserve it.  

With a lack of real foundation, this also floods really badly in the spring, much like our back alley.  The new plan is to add a French drain around three sides of our garage, hoping to direct water toward the alley and the street where it will eventually drain properly instead of flooding the garage and submerging the sill plate.  If that doesn't work, I'll consider adding a rain garden to the backyard this spring: then the water will have a shorter distance to go.  

At this point, I've hit all the major goals for the Garage Challenge, and I have plenty of time to stretch into improving drainage, some fun add-ons, and getting ready for "Garage: Phase 2."  In total, I've spent $1316.78 on this garage.  Most of that is insurance funds for the roof; the rest is completely worth it! Five weeks ago, I was dreading this project, but over the course of the last several weeks I've started to gain a lot of pride in this little space!  

For Real-Time updates, check out my Instagram! I share a lot in stories, and have a lot of the day-to-day progress on the "Garage" highlight.