Category Archives: Room Renovations

First Projects in the New Garage

The finished garage in this new home was one of the things that I was most excited about. After nearly 10 years in an unfinished space, I was eager to have a bright, insulated space to work on projects.

Days after moving in, I somehow managed to talk Sara into getting a heater for the garage. To me, it seemed like a no-brainer: The wall was already insulated and the floor had a drain, where melting snow from our vehicles could go. Several companies gave us estimates for installing a heater. We went with the lowest bid and the company installed a Reznor 45,000 BTU natural gas heater.

While the walls of the garage were insulated, previous owners overlooked the ceiling. I hired an insulation company to blow in the roughly 500 sq/ft. of insulation needed.

I’m so happy with the heater. On my first few tests, it had no trouble heating the space by about 20 degrees in a matter of minutes. I plan to leave it off during the summer, and keep it set to around 55 degrees during the cold months.

My next project in the garage was storage. I installed some shelving and found a home for my work bench and tools. Additionally, after we replaced the kitchen appliances, I put the older stainless steel fridge in the garage.

The final garage project I’ll discuss in this post is the updated staircase into the house. This upgrade came after I struggled to get into the house with an armful of groceries. I wanted a larger space to stand on when opening the door into the house and also wanted to build shelves for shoe storage.

We’re so happy with the steps and all of our improvements in the garage so far. Thanks for reading!

-Mike

2022 Color of the Year

This story all starts because we had an out-of-date front entry light that was gifted to us by Sara’s parents when we first moved into this house. The ceiling lamp served its purpose for many years, but it was beginning to look dated and the small bulbs did not provide enough light for the space.

The front entry always seemed so dark. The brown paint didn’t help, either.

We found a new lamp at Menards. During the installation, we quickly realized that the mount of the lamp did not cover as much of the ceiling as the previous lamp, exposing discolored parts of the ceiling. My first thought was to simply paint the ceiling so it would have a uniform appearance. However, the paint caused yet another issue – as soon as I began to roll on the white ceiling paint, the popcorn began to peel off onto the roller! Fully aware that I had now unleashed a pandora’s box of a project, I accepted the burden ahead of me and got to work scraping off the popcorn.

The scraping was actually much easier than I feared. It worked best to spray water on the popcorn then use a drywall knife to scrape it clean.
Dust EVERYWHERE.

After scraping the ceiling completely, I spent some of my free-time over the next week mudding rough spots – sanding and repeating before priming and ultimately painting the ceiling. This step always seems to take the longest, perhaps because I’m still not terribly great at mudding.

Look at how bright the space is now!

We did end up swapping out the 100 watt bulbs seen in the photo above with slightly less overpowering 60 watt bulbs. The ceiling painted and new lamp secured in place, the next step was to prime and paint the brown walls.

This is a big space!

Sara had it in her head that she wanted to cover the dark brown. She had expressed that it wasn’t her favorite color that we picked out originally, but we still wanted to use these tall walls for an accent color. Through simple Googling we looked up the most popular paint colors and found a list of many options. Already leaning towards a green, we both agreed that we liked the 2022 color of the year: Evergreen Fog by Sherwin Williams. We sampled the color up against a couple of other gray/greens and after seeing it across several times of day, decided to get a gallon (by the way, a gallon of this stuff set us back $79 at Ace. Yikes!) Here are some of the after pics showing the paint color both at night and with daylight coming into the house:

We painted the walls in the front entry Behr’s “Irish Mist” color from Home Depot, which we have used elsewhere in the house. Also, we want to note that we still prefer Behr paint. We had never worked with Sherwin Williams paint before and while we were not surprised that the color required two coats, the product was more tedious to work with in comparison to Behr.

Here is a picture of how the front entry looks now, new ceiling lamp and all:

Thanks for reading!
-Mike