I’m a visual person, so I thought it would be fun to start with a slideshow of the progression that has taken place so far. I feel like we’ve been in the garage working every single, all day…and it’s because we have. We are really trying to get this space finished before school and baseball start back up, because once those two things happen we literally have no time to work aside from 3 am.

So far let’s break down what we’ve completed so far:

• Removed garage door

• Replaced old windows with these.

• Enclosed the garage by building a wall with these.

• Started framing the ‘hallway’ into the garage. This and this helped that project go INSANELY fast!

• We purchased this super affordable and modern ceiling fan to go in the place of the old garage door motor.

• We grabbed a couple of these for makeshift rods, and these to hold them in place.

• So far we’ve bought close to what feels like 2937934 bottles of this and this to seal the entire space down.

• Framed out the windows with my favorite framing material.

• And used what feels like gallons and gallons of paint. Brick is p-o-r-o-u-s. ( It actually hasn’t taken THAT much paint, but we had a few mishaps with our painting materials. I’ll touch base on that in this post!)

We have gotten so many fun, and semi hilarious guesses as to what exactly we’re doing with this space. I think the winning guess was a new baby. I will say, as awesome as that would be, we are not pregnant, and this will not be a nursery. HOWEVER, we will be turning it into our two oldest sons shared bedroom/man cave and we/they are SO thrilled about that.

If you’ve been following for awhile, then you know we outgrew our house before we even moved in, but for the price, the land, and potential we were able to look past that and make way with what we had. It never felt like a burden, or that we we’re a bunch of sardines crammed into a little rectangular container, it was actually quite the opposite. We love being close, and are teaching our children that you don’t need a certain amount of square footage to be happy. It’s not about the size of your home, it’s the people that live within it’s walls.

As you guys can tell, paint has done this space WONDERS. It’s always amazing seeing how much a room transforms with a can of paint. It’s already so much brighter with the paint and new windows. We went back and forth on the ceiling, but ultimately decided that even though it’s a little ‘farm house-ish’ we didn’t want to disturb, or fix something, that wasn’t broken. We plan on painting it the same colors as the walls. The original plan was a black ceiling, but we didn’t want the space to feel smaller.

Where you see the framed ‘hallway’ is where we will install a new door, allowing us to remove the kitchen door (counting down the days until this happens, because I CAN-NOT-WAIT for that door to go to the CURB. We have a hate/hate relationship. We will build a step down stair since there’s a height difference between our kitchen and the new hallway. The electrical will also be moved to the new studded wall, instead of in the kitchen where it is now.

Speaking of electrical, it has been pretty tricky, but we have a modern/industrial plan that we will share when we get to that step. I’m excited to share our mood board/inspiration behind the space to give you a better feel for the overall aesthetic.

One big issue we ran into was HVAC. Since our unit is in the basement, we had to bring in a separate unit to condition the space. It should be arriving soon, and will go on the wall shown above. We will definitely be doing a behind the scenes of that entire process in case you want to convert a garage into a livable space in the near future.

So what’s next? We are going to be doing the following:

• Painting the floor

• Installing baseboards

• Finishing hanging drywall on the hallway wall

• Install new hallway door

• Patch/caulk the remainder of holes

• Paint ceiling

• Finish electrical

• Install new HVAC unit

• DECORATE, DECORATE, DECORATE!

Our youngest son is so excited to start revamping his soon to be own room, and it’s the sweetest thing in the world! The older boys cannot wait to have their new mature, modern space either. This will give us four bedrooms vs three, and will for sure be a game changer!

If you don’t already follow us on Instagram, make sure you hop over there and give us a follow. We have been doing behind the scenes of this entire garage space, and those highlights don’t always make it over here to the website!

Thank you guys so much for stopping by and checking in our garage renovation project! Stay tuned for the next update, our mood/vision board for this space!