A Sick Family and More Home Improvements. Part 1

With all of the family still sick with the cold I passed around, work still had to continue around the house. Even before our water blew up at the beginning of January Bea and I talked about finishing our garage. While it won’t add any value when we get ready to sell in a year or so, it will give it that extra wow factor. I just wish I would have really looked at the garage when we had bought the house. This project has been going on for four days already, and I have the feeling it’s going to take the rest of the week to finish. A lot of the walls are in pretty terrible shape and I have had to make several patches and repairs.

The main work started with the water heater repair. Before I reinstalled it, I primed and painted the walls, getting rid of the drywall and just making it look better. (You can read and see all about that repair here.) Now with that, all painted the rest of the garage looked like ass. Since I was at home sick and starting to feel a little better, and with Bea feeling a little better I took the opportunity to start on what is so far the biggest home improvement project to date. I wasn’t sure how I was going to accomplish this with all of the crap we have in the garage, and the fact that we park Bea’s SUV in the garage. I decided to start on the wall with the least amount of stuff on it. The first step was to take all of the old drywall tape that was dried out and falling off the wall. Pretty much all of the tape on the bottom of the wall was completely falling off. I ripped it all off and cleaned up the old mud that was still stuck to the wall. I bought this awesome “cheater” tape that eliminates the need for a thin layer of mud and makes the job way easier. With the new tape on I put the first layer of mud over the tape and filled in all the holes that were in the wall, and there was a ton of them.

While waiting for the mud to dry I started to look at this terrible patch job I did when we first moved into the house. So I decided that since I had drywall leftover from the water heater job I would tackle this repair and then move on. Man! It turned into so much more work than I had thought. After I cut out the repair I had made, I started noticing little strings hanging off the wall from a different kind of drywall tape. I started pulling on it and it just kept going. You could tell that there was a big patch that was previously done, my guess is from fixing the water supply that was in the garage. I followed the line and started to cut into this “repair”. I pulled on the tape some more and that’s when I saw that the tape covered the entire patch and it was just pieces of drywall that were puzzled together. And that made my 8″ x 8″ hole into a 3′ x 3′ hole, not what I was expecting. Luckily I had all that drywall leftover because boy did it come in handy. After getting all that pieced together drywall out and the new drywall into place, I got the rest of the dried-up tape off the bottom and the wall. I then taped up the newly installed drywall and the bottom of the wall and put the first coat of mud onto it. And let me tell you, it was already starting to look better.

Now the problem we were running into was having to move all of the tools and stuff around to get to the car and leave. So Bea and I talked about it, and we decided it would be better to just park her SUV outside for a while and to move all of the stuff in the garage into the center of the room so I can work on all the walls and hopefully get this project finished up sooner. After moving my SUV into the street and Bea’s into the driveway I started the process of moving all of the stuff around. While doing this I found even more issues with the walls that were going to have to be addressed. The wall that was connected to the laundry room had so many holes in it. I don’t know what they were trying to hang, but it was a lot of stuff. While I was cleaning up the old dried-up mud from the old tape I noticed that the wall pushed in, in a few places, which was weird. After some investigation, I found a lot of mud was used to try and patch a hole, so I cut out that section and replaced it. But before I replaced the little section, I screwed in some new drywall screws into the wall to secure it back onto the studs. Doing this created a new issue, that being the old drywall nails were sticking out and I had to pull them all out. But, with all the old nails pulled out, the hole patched up, and new tape and mud on this wall was done and just needed to dry.

With the second wall done, now it was time to move the stuff from the third wall to the center of the garage. With Jameson taking a nap, Bea was able to help with these tasks for a few minutes before he woke up. So with Bea now gone, I got the rest of the stuff out of the way and started peeling off all of the old dried-up tape. When we moved into the house the garage had these old wooden shelves hanging on the wall next to the garage door. I used it to store all of my Adams Polishes I used to use to wash the cars. Well three of the bottles starting to leak and made a nice green mark down the wall. So to do the job right, I took the shelves off the wall, pulled out all of the anchors used to secure it to the wall, and filled in all of the holes. The next task was to pull off all of the dried-up tape from the top of the wall and ceiling. The top of the wall was another surprise, they layered the drywall tape on top of another piece, and from what I learned from the University of Google, is you are not supposed to double up on the tape, as this can cause sagging and it could dry out faster. Well, the professors were right and the tape was basically already falling off the wall the entire length of it. I cleaned up the old plaster and started to tape the top of the wall, then all that work came to a screeching halt, I ran out of tape and it was too late in the day to make a Lowe’s run. So the rest of the mudding and taping had to wait for the next day.

It’s now Monday and a national holiday, so I was still off work and was able to get more tape first thing in the morning. Now with tape in hand, I finished where I had left off the night before and had everything taped up and ready for the first layer of mud. But the mud would have to wait, I needed to take a break, and hang out with my baby boy and wife. So, after a few hours with Jameson, giving him a nebulizer treatment, I put him down for a nap and joined my wife for a nap of our own. After the nap and Jameson waking up, while he was eating I took the opportunity to mud the rest of the garage wall, and add a second coat of mud on the other wall. With everything now needing to dry overnight, it is time to relax and try to enjoy the rest of my holiday with my family.