garage time.

It's been tough with all the getting out. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But I have a garage to do this month and literally every weekend is being spent in the mountains. Summer is short here in the Pacific Northwest. Even shorter this year it seems. Has it even really started? Regardless - before I know it autumn will be here for real. Maybe next week.

So ... in the meantime I have a garage to do. Cos maybe after it's done I'll get to do the back patio. But probably not cos it'll get too cold so I'll get to work finishing the low-voltage wiring and drywall and painting in my bedroom instead.

And anyway - well I spent a little time with a tape measure today measuring for trim. The plan is to make the box-of-a-garage look at least a little more like the house. I remember way back when I had the thought of ripping off the roof and redoing it to match the pitch of the house. Well, that's what I would have done had I built the thing. But yeah - not really going to do that since I, well, didn't. Instead - it'll be in the details hopefully that it'll end up looking like it and the house are sort of a pair.

And the details are - well - mostly trim. Here's the fancy sketch I put together today (complete with crayons!) -

The basic idea is to match the trim above the front porch so that looking at the garage behind the house it'll - like I said - look like it goes together. Breaking down how trim is done is sort of fun. Like for the drip cap it's basically a 1x2 combined with a piece of cove molding on the underside. And so on.

But it's usually pretty simple - as in just dimensional stuff. One-by this and two-by that with some ornamental pieces (like the cove) thrown in to keep things interesting. Maybe half an hour later I was done. And an hour combing through the lumber yard at the local Home Depot had me filling Stuart up with 1x8s, 2x8s, 1x6s, 1x2s and the like.

A while ago I snagged a planer for fifty bucks - going to put it to use now. Trevor's got my beautiful chop saw but he'll be wrapped with it in the next couple of days. And I'm going climbing (of course) this weekend anyway. But there'll be some carpentry I'll have to attempt before I'm ready to plug in my compressor and hook my stapler to my belt to bang these things up ... planing some of the one-by stuff from three-quarters thickness to half an inch. Ripping some 1x2s down from an inch-and-a-half wide to just an inch to keep them from sticking out too far. Routing some 1x2s so they fit in between two horizontal 2x8s but still protrude out from them. I have to glue two 2x8s to make the three architectural beams that stick out like on the front of the house - probably plane them a bit first on the side to be glued before cutting out the notched shape with a circ saw (glueing two 2x boards together cos I don't have a way to cleanly cut the notch shape in a 4x piece of lumber - I thought it was rather ingenious when the idea - or more like realization - hit me in the aisle at Homie-D). Going to tear down the 2x4 rakes on the garage gable and replace them with beefier 2x8s (they're pretty decrepit and the paint is all peeling off them anyway) - and have to notch them for the architectural beams. Tear down the 1x4 corner trim on the three corners of the garage I can see and replace with 1x6s to match the house. And of course hang cedar shake in the gable just like I did above the porch.

It'll be fun.

And with all the carpentry work that I'll have to attempt I realize there won't be much painting to do. Especially since I'm - uhh - only doing the two sides I can see. The two sides that face the neighbors' fences I'm not going to touch ... I never see them so why bother? Yeah - makes sense to me.

So anyway - going to get to work over the next few weeks starting with the planing and such before I can roll on primer and then hang them. I actually really like doing carpentry even if I'm a total hack at it. There won't be much scraping to do cos most of the chipped paint is on trim that I'm tearing off - haha. I should have enough of the Sussex Green left from last year to paint the two sides of the garage, but I'll probably have to pick up a quart of the Sandy Hook Green (the lighter stuff) and maybe another gallon of the Brilliant White.

And after it's all finished hopefully it'll look like it sort of matches the house. Just what to do then about the garage door ... oh, and lights ... but I'll get to that.