In the final stages of the turmoil that’s been my steady diet for the last 6+ years (the inevitable death of my marriage, the loss of my job, the loss of my house, the loss of some tools and the acquisition of new tools, sons-in-laws, grandchildren, court dates, etc.) I decided to buy a new house, since living indoors seemed like a really good idea at the time. That, and I needed a space where I could set up shop and start making again. Turning has become more than just a hobby, it’s become a necessary way to deal with stress. House-hunting has never been something I particularly enjoy, because there never seems to be a property that has everything you think you want. There’s always a trade-off and the trick is to try to find something where the trade-offs aren’t fatal. Great location, but missing a bedroom. Great kitchen, but the basement is musty. Perfect layout, but it’s right between a small business and a crack house. When I was looking for a place, I found a house that was the right size, the right layout, the right location, the right price, the right exterior, and it had a good sized garage, complete with a sub panel that wasn’t maxed out. PERFECT! Aside from the nuisance of the yard being absolutely infested by chipmunks (I’ve killed 25 already this year only to see two more of the little bastards frolicking in the driveway), the only real down side was the age of the house. When the building inspection came up (more or less) clean, I figured that “trade-off” would be manageable. I bought it quickly and started the planning to turn the garage into a workshop while I waited for the closing. Since there was a sub panel already there, I figured all I’d have to do was add a couple 220 lines for the new equipment and I’d be set. Then, after the prior owner moved all their stuff out, a cold, cruel, reality started to set in as we did the final walk-through.

The first thing I noticed was there was only one outlet in the garage. One. Who does that? My quick and easy electrical fix was obviously going to be a little more complicated. I talked with an electrician the realtor recommended to see what it would cost to add a few 220 lines and a couple of 110 circuits, expecting to hear that it would be no big deal. He told me there likely wouldn’t be enough capacity in the existing sub panel, so I’d need to run a new line into a whole new sub panel. He also wasn’t sure about the size of the line running into the house’s main panel, so it was possible that I’d need to “do a little upgrade work there” as well, which translated to putting in a whole new power line into the house from the pole outside, updating the main breaker box before adding a second sub panel. For what he wanted to charge, I could have easily built a whole new building in the back yard and wired it to the nines! The second thing I noticed was that this garage had been abused over the years. All of the walls had the remnants of tenants past. There were single shelf brackets sticking out at eye level and a ripped up place where the other had been torn out, random nails everywhere that must have served a specific purpose at some point in the distant past, and several places where you could see something had been bashed into the drywall, leaving either a broken place or a complete hole. Most of the holes had been “patched”, with the prior owner either gluing a new piece of drywall over the hole (honest to god, drywall glued on top of drywall) or nailing a thin piece of plywood over the hole, using an excessive number of old, ring shank drywall nails. The paint was faded and dirty, the single light fixture was circa 1972, there were cracks in the concrete that needed patched, and the whole place reeked of 40 years of general neglect.

Then winter hit. As I have done in every other house I’ve lived in, I left a case of pop and a case of beer in the garage to save space in the refrigerator. Things were good, until the temperature dropped below freezing. I went to get something to drink and noticed that all of the cans had frozen. What? How’d that happen? I put a thermometer out there and it quickly went to 6 degrees which matched the outside temperature. Then, I went to one of the drywall patch jobs on the back wall, removed the patch, and saw naked brick staring back at me. The front wall and the side wall were all the same. Apparently, back when the house was built, putting insulation into a garage wasn’t seen as a necessity. Neither were double paned, insulated windows, insulated doors, or concrete sealants. My remodel just got even more complex.

It was at that point I realized my plans to quickly be up and running weren’t going to work. The only cure for what ailed this garage was a complete remodel. NOT what I was expecting when I bought the place, but then again some of the best things in life come out of left field. On paper, it looks pretty straightforward: Rip out the old drywall, run the electrical, add some insulation, put up something to cover the insulation, and kick back in my new shop. I figured I’d use chip board, that way I could mount anything to the wall, anywhere I wanted, without necessarily needing to always be finding a stud. Armed with my new vision, I started sketching out options for tool placement, lighting, and electrical needs, which was all pretty straightforward. When the sketches were finished, the divorce got to a point where the end was in sight, and the weather became much warmer, the project was ready to begin.

Step one – the demolition: This was supposed to be the quickest and easiest and fastest part of the process, but cathartic violence always ends too quickly! As I started taking down big chunks of drywall, it dawned on me I had no way to dispose of it. A quick look around revealed I’d also need to get rid of chunks of mortar that had fallen on the base of the framing and been encased in the old wall, a bunch of quarter round trim some prior owner had put up to cover the corner seams in the drywall, and about 10 million rusted nails. Seriously, whoever did this work in the past must have been sponsored by a company who made nails and paid him based on the number he used. I started looking at dumpster rentals, but for the (relatively) small amount of garbage I’d have, that wasn’t anywhere close to cost effective. I called the city to see what others have typically done and got a crash course in governmental “assistance”. After two transfers, I got ahold of a woman who was in charge of bulk waste pickup. Her suggestion was to just “pile it on the curb where the picker truck could access it” and I’d be fine. When I explained what a mess that was going to make, pointed out the rain in the forecast and what it would likely to do the drywall scraps, and mentioned the 20 pounds of nails I’d collected so far, she made another suggestion. “Just put it in your normal trash can and the garbage truck will take it. Just be careful to stay under the weight limit.” How helpful! So instead of throwing away actual garbage, I was supposed to just keep cramming debris into the garbage can and stop before some mystical weight limit had been reached. I thanked her for her input and figured I was on my own. What I ended up doing was filling up whatever space was remaining in the normal garbage can with debris, then putting everything else out on the curb in boxes. Thank god for Amazon free shipping and daughters who compulsively buy everything online! Along with the debris issue, I saw that I had in fact been wrong about there being no insulation. One wall had what looked like sheets of some kind of fibrous “insulation”. It was 3/4″ thick, wasn’t tight between the studs, and was held only by (you guessed it) a handful of nails at the very top, leaving it to dangle between the studs like some kind of forgotten decoration. (I wondered if that’s what the guy did with his leftover insulation sheets he didn’t know how to dispose of, just hid them behind the wall?) As far as actually insulating anything, it served absolutely no purpose. Not only did I have to tear it down and stack it neatly by the curb, there were also another couple hundred nails to deal with.

Step two – permits: The next step was to call the city. I talked to a guy from my new neighborhood who had just finished a complete remodel of his kitchen – all without any permits – and he strongly advised me to do the work under the cover of darkness and NOT let the city know anything about what I was doing. Not wanting to get in trouble with the town, being too much of a Boy Scout, and resigning myself to the very real probability that someone would intentionally rat me out to the city, I decided to play by the rules. A quick call to the city told me $30 and a completed building permit form I could pull down from their website and I’d be good to go. I went down to city hall with $30 in hand, a completed form, and a friendly smile on my face. That’s when I realized I had unexpected walked into my second lesson on governmental “assistance”. Turns out, the woman on the phone was giving me an “estimate” of what needed to be done. The $30 fee quoted was for a building permit, but since I was touching the sub-panel, I’d need an additional electrical permit, which was another $40. Since there were two permits being issued for the project, I was “classed” as a more complex project, which would require a conversation with both the building inspector and the electrical inspector before I could start ANY of the work, including the demolition. (I didn’t have the heart to tell them I had already started the demolition, out of fear there would be a specific and costly “you-jumped-the-gun” fine.) The inspectors were both out of the office at the moment, but they would be contacting me “at some point”, then I could start the project. She took my money, took my forms, took both my dignity and faith in humanity, and she was the one smiling as I walked away.

Step three – insulation: As I was waiting for the inspectors to call me, I started looking into what my options would be to add insulation to the garage. NOT putting in insulation meant everything would still freeze and there would be nothing to dampen the sound, so this really wasn’t an optional part of the remodel. My question seemed simple: How do you insulate against a brick exterior wall? Very quickly, I found myself in this weird limbo place where everyone I asked would quickly suck air in as they pondered my dilemma and say, “yeah… good luck with that”. Everything I had been told was that you need some kind of vapor barrier to control the moisture, but I’ve never had a brick home before, so I didn’t know if that was true with brick. According to the experts on YouTube it was true, but those experts never seemed to be working with a naked brick exterior wall. I called a local insulation company to ask, but they didn’t want to answer my question, they just wanted to come out and make a quote to do the work. No help. I called the big box stores and the employees/department managers of Menard’s, Home Depot, and Lowes were all clueless. No help. I called a company who sold foam insulation and they said the only option was to use foam. Shocker! The price they quoted to do a garage was right up there with what the electrician had quoted, so I assumed they must be either close relatives or members of the same union. No help. I went to the store to get some groceries and the radio had a talk show on home improvement and the host of the show kept saying “if you have any questions about insulation, just call me”, so I figured I had nothing to lose, so I called him and left a message. I figured he’s on the radio, so he has to know what he’s doing, right? The man actually called me back the next day and we talked for at least 45 minutes. His direction was to forget about putting up any kind of vapor barrier. If the house hadn’t had any problems for as long as it had been there, the likelihood was very low there would be moisture problems moving forward. He said to buy extra thick insulation batting and just cram it in as tight as I could get it between the studs, right up against the brick and I’d be good to go. Right… Everything he said just seemed wrong to me, but he seemed to be the most sure of his answer of all those I had contacted, so I figured I’d take his advice since it was better than nothing.

Step two – continued – back to permits: A week later, the electrical inspector called. Since the form I had completed said I was the “electrical contractor” (which is what the smiling woman behind the desk said I should put) there was a problem. It seems I’m not registered with the town as an electrician, which is a requirement for getting an electrical permit as an “electrical contractor”. My options were to either hire an electrician and have them get a new permit (no, there is no refund for the permit I already bought) or to pay the fee to register myself as an electrician with the town. BUT, since I didn’t have the requisite training to be a licensed electrician, that option wouldn’t be approved by the town unless I could show some kind of training completion certification. I explained that I want to do the work myself, since it’s really not that difficult to do, but I have an electrician who’s going to operate in a “consulting” capacity and do the work inside the breaker box. He was OK with that and agreed my project could proceed. BUT… I’d need to have a separate electrical inspection and it would need to be timed with the building inspection. Somehow that sounded like not just trying to find a unicorn and a Sasquatch, but having to find a Sasquatch actually riding a unicorn. The building inspector called next. When I asked him why I needed a building inspection since I wasn’t doing any framing or changing anything structural, he explained that as soon as I started drilling holes through studs to run the wires, he would need to “ensure I had not damaged the structural integrity of the walls”. Apparently in the past, there have been major problems with people either drilling too many holes in a single stud, drilling the holes in the wrong place, or removing studs altogether. I tried to explain that the walls in the garage aren’t load bearing walls, the brick structure holds all the weight of the roof, but he was unmoved. He laid out the sequence of events that would need to happen: I could do the demolition, run all the wiring, then stop for the building inspection. When he was done, the electrical inspector could come inspect the electrical work. If everything was approved, then I could do the insulation and add the new drywall, then schedule him for a final building inspection. Wait, Drywall? I never said anything about drywall! I told him I didn’t want to put drywall up, I wanted to put up chipboard so I could hang whatever I wanted wherever I wanted without having to find a stud to anchor it. It was then he explained that having anything but drywall on the walls was a fire hazard and my house would immediately become “uninhabitable”, in clear violation of city codes. His suggestion was to put chipboard behind the drywall, but he couldn’t suggest where I might go to sell a kidney or a cornea to pay for the extra materials. Since he was being so helpful (too bad there’s not a specific font for sarcasm…) I decided to ask him about the proper way to insulate against brick. In all honesty, I was just trying to waste as much of his time as he was wasting of mine! His initial suggestion was to use spray foam, cementing my notion that somewhere there’s a club where all these people get together and formulate sinister pacts with each other. I’m pretty sure it’s not the Free Masons or Illuminati, because this group seems to be more shadowy than those groups. I told him the issues I had with using spray foam and he actually came across with a really, really good solution. He said to use the pink polystyrene sheets and wedge them between the studs at the back, which would leave a space between the insulation and the brick to lessen any moisture that would build up, then put normal, faced, batting up on top the polystyrene. Between the facing on the insulation, the coating on the polystyrene, and a thick coat of paint, I would have an effective moisture barrier and an air gap by the brick. I had a new plan that was only mildly more expensive and actually seemed better than what “radio guy” had given me.

Step three – insulation (continued): With the city satisfied, I finished the rest of the demolition, then start doing the insulation and drywall on the parts that would NOT have any electrical work. Generally, this meant the wall of the garage that was mostly made up of the garage door. To get the old drywall out and the new insulation and drywall in, I had to unbolt the garage door track from the wall. The first side went surprising smoothly and my confidence in the project increased. As I moved to the middle of the garage door, ripping out drywall, I ran into the bracket that holds the torsion springs. Now I’ve had to call people to replace broken torsion springs before, so I knew they were under pressure, or at least I should have known. When I took the last bolt out of the bracket holding the springs, a chain reaction was triggered. First, the bracket and the rod the springs were attached to spun out violently, which knocked the drill out of my hand and threw it across the room. The sudden spinning caused the rod to fall out of the pullys on the edge of the door, which caused the door itself to jerk violently, which caused several of the rollers to come out of their tracks. One of those rollers caused one of the old, rusted hinges to break in half, which caused the roller attached to the hinge to twist, which caused the roller bearing to break off the shaft. All of that happened in less than a second. Not enough time to swear, but enough time to realize just how lucky I’d been because I wasn’t standing directly in the path of the destruction. I had no choice but to pick up all the broken pieces, call the garage door repairman and schedule an appointment for their “next available” appointment. In the three days I had to wait for them to come out, I finished doing all of the demolition in the entire garage and finished the insulation and new drywall on the wall that had the garage door. The garage door people came out and had a real good laugh at my expense! Apparently, this is a common thing with homeowners who try to do their own garage door repairs. The way he said “homeowners” made me think he had successfully balanced his desire to say something a lot less nice with his desire to get paid. He was able to get the door working again, but told me his best guess was the entire garage door system had been installed in the early 80’s, because the sticker left on the door was from a company that went out of business about then. Just to hedge his bet, he added, “but it could be older, just judging by how beat up it is”. The garage door, the tracks, and the opener were all well past their shelf life and all needed to be replaced. Great! I decided that’s a “later” kind of problem, paid the man to fix the door so it would work again, and went on to the next step…

Step four – electrical: While I’ve been around electrical work in the past, I have to admit that I really didn’t know what I was supposed to do and had been putting off starting that part of the project. Luckily, I know people who know things! I talked with a guy who used to work for his dad, who was an electrician, and he was able to teach me enough so I could run the new circuits. After going to school on his knowledge, I realized that it really wasn’t all that difficult and I actually knew more than I was giving myself credit for having learned. As luck would have it, there was just enough space in the existing sub-panel to add the 4 new circuits I needed to run, and the total load wasn’t going to be that much, so the whole “you need a new sub panel” was complete BS. I had been warned that code says you can only run two wires through any given hole in a stud, and the hole had better be in the exact center of the stud, so I made sure to comply with those rules as I started planning out where the wires would go and began drilling holes through studs. It took me longer than I expected, but after a couple of days I had four working circuits that didn’t explode when I tested them out! Feeling very smug, satisfied, and happy to have extra money in my pocket from doing the work myself, I called the building inspector and the electrical inspector to claim my victory laps!

These sadistic bastards much have been sitting on their phones, just waiting for an inspector’s equivalent of a lottery win, like a “homeowner” all full of hope and happiness calling them for a final inspection. I called the building inspector at 9:30 in the morning and he scheduled a final inspection for 1:15 that afternoon. Then I called the electrical inspector and set up a time with him, but not surprisingly, they certainly didn’t coordinate schedules and I was told by his secretary he’d have to call me back. When a shiny new pickup with the town’s logo on the side pulled in front of my house at 1:10, I assumed that was the building inspector. He sat in his truck until a second shiny pickup with an identical logo pulled up behind him. To my surprise, it was both the building inspector AND the electrical inspector. Apparently, they had decided to do a “joint inspection” to save me some time, but their smiles made me suddenly very nervous. The building inspector went first. After an intense glance around the garage that lasted all of 30 seconds, he said, “you’re good from me. I don’t need to see anything else”. Wait, what? Apparently, my hole drilling was so wonderfully centered that even without actually looking at them, he was able to tell that I hadn’t “damaged the structural integrity of the house.” Next was the electrical inspector’s turn. As he started to say, “do you want the good news or the bad news first?” he morphed into a toothy grin, kinda like the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. He started with the good news, in that my “wire management was exceptional” and praised the way the wires were stapled and complimented me on my decision to run all the wires near the bottoms of the walls to prevent future accidents when trying to hang shelving. The he proceeded to rattle off a list of things that needed fixed. For the work I did, I needed lower amp breakers and GCFI breakers and/or GCFI outlets on all four circuits I had put in. Then he started in on the list of things that were wrong with the existing wiring, evidently forgetting that he had told me I didn’t need to do anything with the old wiring, since it was “grandfathered in”. Now, I was being required to rewire the breaker box to remove the neutral/ground jumper, isolate the ground from the neutral on each existing circuit, remove the old existing outlet that was already in the garage, create a new junction box on the old circuit, remove a light switch that was being used as a junction box since the light had been removed, and add more insulation to the existing wires where they clamp onto the breaker box. There would be no victory lap, at least not today. When I was done with all that, I could call for another inspection.

Turns out, the breaker box that I have is no longer made, so finding breakers that have the GCFI built in cost about $80 each for the 220v circuits and $60 for the 110v circuits. Thanks to Amazon prime, I got the 220v breakers for $45 each, and used GCFI outlets on the head of the 110v circuits, so the total cost for the GCFI’s dropped under $125. Then, I spent another day basically removing everything that was wired inside the breaker box so I could shuffle the white wires to one side and the bare wires to the other, and wrapped a piece of wire insulation around the wires that went into the box like some kind of electrical condom. A couple days later, the electrical inspector came back out and gave me a nice pretty green sticker to say that I was done with the electrical. Finally, my victory lap!

Step three – insulation (continued): Now that all the wiring was done, I could finish all the rest of the insulation. With help from my daughter (thanks, Megan) we were able to cut up and install all the polystyrene, staple up all the insulation, and get everything ready for drywall. My initial estimates of it taking a day to finish the insulation turned out to be wildly inaccurate. There is no possible way the guy who framed the garage was sober, because there were no two studs that were the same distance apart. Instead of being a standard 14 1/2″ between studs, some were as close as 10″ and some as wide as 23″. He must have also been plastered when he bought the studs, too, because this is the worst quality I’ve seen in building materials. The discount bin at Menards has higher quality stuff! Some studs were warped so bad there would be a 2″ bow in the middle of the stud. Some were also twisted, so the distance at the back of the stud was a quarter inch or more different than the front of the stud. Rather than cutting all the pieces at once and installing them in quick succession, we were left with cutting each piece of polystyrene to fit the exact space for each gap. As I was finishing up, it dawned on me that getting drywall in standard sheets to land with an edge on the studs might be a problem later on. That, my friends, is called precognition!

Step five – Install new back door: The back door of the garage presented a whole new set of issues. The existing door was 2″ thick, solid wood, but had a single pane glass panel in it and absolutely no weather stripping . I wanted to put in a steel insulated door, but quickly realized that wouldn’t be possible. When they build the deck off the back, they made the deck sit on top the brick shelf of the garage floor, so the deck was higher than the bottom of the back garage door. That left an awkward step up to get out of the door. To “fix” that issue, they built a step/platform on the inside of the garage and cut 5″ off the bottom of the door to make is clear the new step. If I replaced the entire door and frame, I’d have the same problem they did, but wouldn’t be able to cut the bottom of the steel door off without destroying the structural integrity of the door. I could order a custom door, but I figured the custom door people were most likely in the same shady society that electricians and the insulation guys were in. The building inspector (who turned out to be a really nice guy) just told me to add some weather stripping to the door and buy a replacement double paned panel for the window and it would be just as good as a steel door. A quick visit to Menards to order the new window panel and I was on my way. When it came in, I started the install and quickly realized that the guy at Menards had ordered the wrong size. I called Menards and was told “You got exactly what you ordered. You should have known that this replacement glass only fits a Mastercraft door before you placed the order, so there are no returns and no refunds.” In other words, the first guy lied to me about the panel fitting a “rough opening” like double hung windows, so I was stuck. I called the store manager, who did an exhaustive investigation and called me back within 3 minutes to tell me that it was all my fault, but he was willing to give me a store credit if I returned the “bad” window in it’s original, unopened package and ordered a new window from them. I wasn’t the least bit polite in my response, considering he knew I had already opened the package, which is how I found out the new window didn’t fit. I ended up cutting the window hole in the door bigger on all four sides and installed the new panel. It worked, but I still don’t think I’ll be shopping at Menards for a very long time!

Step six: install new window: There is an old window on the back wall of the garage that is an odd sized, awning style, single pane window that has a small crack running through the top of the window. Judging from the layer upon layer of dust, I’m guessing it’s been that way for a very long time. I started pricing custom made windows and was surprised at just how expensive they can be. Clearly, window manufacturers are in the secret society, too! I started looking at how the existing window was framed in and how the outside of the window was finished and started calculating how long it would take to redo all of the framing. After looking at the price tag, time, and labor it would take to replace the window, I decided to see if the garage could hold an acceptable temperature this winter, and postpone replacing the window for another day. If it got too bad, I could always cut some of the left over polystyrene sheets to fit over the window. Step six: install new window: Cancelled!

Step seven: drywall: My suspicions while working on the insulation about the malformed, haphazard placement of the studs would be an issue turned out to be spot on! Like the polystyrene, many of the pieces of drywall had to be trimmed in weird ways to get the edges to hit a stud and in a couple of places, scrap wood had to be nailed to the side of the stud to hit the panel. I did learn several things while doing this part of the project. First, I have a new respect for people who do this for a living, because it really is dusty, labor intensive work that has absolutely no element of fun attached to it. Second, when I was a kid I hated being asked to write on the chalk board at school because the feel and texture of the chalk would send shivers down my spine. Drywall is just a massive piece of chalk, so the whole time I was trying to work, I was constantly trying to resist the “willies”.

Mudding the drywall came next. That’s a process where a chalky, pasty, joint compound is spread across the joints to level out any gaps, cover any mistakes, and leave the walls looking smooth. If having to handle the chalk like dry wall wasn’t bad enough, this stuff is straight from hell. Once the joint compound dries, it has the same consistency and effect as chalk, so the constant willies comes back to the front. It’s also really dusty, so when you sand it smooth, you get to either inhale all that dust or rig up some extensive network of shop vacs, dust collectors, and fans which only serve to cover everything on your property with a fine layer of white dust. The dust seems to be particularly attracted to black Suburbans. I intentionally put the first attempt at using the joint compound on very thick, thinking if I did it right the first time, it would save time later. Good thought, but it turns out to be a lot harder than it looks to spread this crap out and make the wall even. After sanding back the first attempt, it was clear there were multiple places that would need some touch up work and a second layer of joint compound. After sanding the second layer, I decided that “good enough” was going to be my new motto concerning drywall work. If you ever see my garage, you’ll see multiple places where the seams are visible, the joint compound is visible, and screw heads can be easily spotted. Go ahead, say something, I really don’t care. It looks better than it did, it satisfied the building inspector, and I’d rather shit in my hands and clap before doing anymore drywall work! It is good enough…

Step 8: painting: Here’s a little tip, in case you haven’t done this before. Brand new drywall is thirsty. Really, REALLY, thirsty! I knew I needed to prime it first, and since the paint was intended to provide some level of moisture barrier protection for the wall, I bought a high quality primer and tried to put a thick, heavy coat on the wall. Once done, according to the can, it would be ready to be painted over in an hour. PERFECT! I set an alarm for two hours, figuring I’d let it dry twice as long before putting on the enamel paint. When the alarm went off, I went to the garage and was amazed at just how much of the primer had “disappeared”. After swearing for awhile, I went back to the store and bought another gallon of primer and put on a second coat. An hour later, the walls looked to be a consistent white, with no patchy or bare spots. Two coats of paint on top of the primer and the painting was easily the least complicated part of this whole project!

Step 9: The FINAL electrical inspection: When the inspector came out the second time and told me everything I’d done was good to go, I thought I was done with him. Not so lucky! There’s a “final final” inspection that has to come before everything’s “legal”. I asked him why, if he’d already approved all the work and his response was clearly a sign of the times we live in. Apparently, some people will claim they’re only doing a little bit of work to lessen the cost of the project they report to the city. The thought is this that will prevent an increase in their property taxes. Then, once they get their green sticker, they do a whole lot of other work after the inspector has already signed off. Honestly, that hadn’t even occurred to me. I wanted to believe the inspector when he told me how shoddy the “extra” work would likely be, but I have to admit I was now secretly contemplating what other electrical work I could do after he finally left… For the final final inspection, I’m still not sure if he even looked at the electrical box, I really think he’s just nosy and wanted to see what my workshop looked like after I got all the equipment moved in and placed. After 30 seconds of “inspection” and 40 minutes of talking about woodworking projects, I was done with my final final inspection and could take the permit approval stickers down.

Step 10: Celebration: This is by far the most adventurous project I’ve ever attempted by myself and I have to say I’m very pleased with the work that I’ve done. There are some things that still need to be addressed (like a replacement window and a new garage door) by I feel like for all intents and purposes, the remodel is complete! It was a LOT of work, but everything is finding a new place to be stored, all of the new machinery will power on without tripping breakers, and it won’t be long before I can make pretty much anything I want! Life is good, I tell you, life is very good!

Step What the hell?: A woman holding a clip board and a toothy grin rang my doorbell. She was very polite and identified herself as being from the city assessor’s office. She was inquiring if the work I was doing on my “garage remodel” was completed or not. I told her it was, pointed to the lovely neon green sticker on the front window and told her all the inspections were done. Then waited for her to explain why she was standing on my doorstep smiling as if she had just been told the funniest joke ever. Well it turns out, her job was to determine just how much my little project would increase the value of my house. THIS is why so many people do shady shit when it comes to working on their houses, because the government is all too eager to penalize people for doing things “by the book”. I took her to the garage and walked through all the work that was done. After what ended up being a very pleasant 20 minute conversation, I was able to convince her that there actually hadn’t been any “improvements” made to the property, all I had done was repair what should have been done right in the first place. She agreed that no realtor was going to jump the price on the home because I did work that no potential buyer would even notice and told me she was leaving the assessment where it was. I figure somewhere along the line, I must have had some good karma that just got cashed in.