I've been debating on doing something similar with our garage.
We technically don't have a garage, about 40% of it was sacrificed to expand the kitchen by the prior owners & the rest was decked to interior slab height & had a mini-split added. It's our office/gym. the 60% side still has a functional garage door, but the other side does not.
When we get heavy rain, I get some seepage under the functional door. Have though about putting in a faux wall like that & sealing it off. Would improve the frontal look of the house & probably add some heat shielding as well [esp if we insulated it].

We've only used the functional door maybe 4 times in 2 years [when we moved in & when we bought a treadmill]. But almost all of those could be accommodated via other entries.

 

It is pretty easy and if it was to be more permanent there are some areas you would be able to seal up better. Water intrusion would be my biggest concern but you could frame out the bottom plate with pressure treated instead and use a better seal than some sill seal which was used here. Sill seal might be enough though if you leave a gap from the edge and then caulk the board to the concrete. Didn't bother with a lot of that though since we will be ripping it back out. If you only use it for you gym though it would cut down on your electricity for the mini split with the added insulation.

 

Some good ideas for sure.
Adding it to the never-ending home tasks list

 

Hinge side of door would have to have an angle cut on the edge to allow it to open past 90° so that side may look a little weird but still better than a half cut trim board.

I like the darker tone for the stain.

60 days for your temp walls? Garage doors taking that long to get delivered?

 

I will have to mock that up and see this weekend.

Garage doors haven't been ordered cause I hadn't made my mind up. Was trying to shop around multiple installers for the doors I really want but can't justify a Type S Integra for 3 garage doors.

The fall back plan should be ordered this week and they take 3-4 weeks. But since the walls are up we don't want to flash the building with high humidity temps at this point so we will likely end up waiting until the end of September for installation at this point.

 

Another week and more rain. Monday, right after I had built the temporary walls of course.





It was such a soaking in such a short time almost had water coming in the lower back door which was a first.


Had the usual water issues as well though


These are now made worse by the fact the water can't go out the front of the building


Thankfully this past Friday we finally got underway to do something about it. Plan is for a 6in french drain and a 6in drain line going to my back yard into the dry creek at the back of the property.



Figured out the optimum path through the least amount of trees. Thankfully the property naturally slopes front to back so there was not really a huge concern about the slope. From the from corner of the garage to the end of the pipe before the drop off to the dry creek was 2ft 8in of natural slope. This is over roughly 90-100ft.










I also finally made the decision last week to just go ahead with the new roof, soffits, and gutters with the issue on the house and the shingles just crumbling trying to remove them and finding no place where a roof repair was not going to be horribly obvious. Those materials got dropped off.

 

The drain work started going in fast after lunch. The inner pipe for gutters, outer for french drain, and at the end a retaining wall will be built right to the outside of the french drain.



Left a spot for a connection from a future surface drain.






We used regular single wall pipe for the gutter connection run. Once everything converged though double wall pipe was used that is smooth on the inside. This will also hopefully help with the fact that piping goes through the wood and all the potential issues with tree roots.








Piping was then covered in 8in of gravel.




Followed by two layers of fabric before the soil went back in


This is where it dumps out at the back of the property. I plan to dig out a bit and build a crash wall for the water to hopefully not erode the bank by the fence. I also will get some large river rock to replace the gravel that is there now but it was good to have something temporarily.



All buttoned back up. There was some light grading work done as well to slope the ground away from the building finally as well. You can barely make out a rough estimate on where the retaining wall will go which is about 5-6ft from the building as there is still a small drop from where the trench was dug.






Now this gives two 6in drain lines now to control the water from the driveway and the garage. One 6in will get the front gutters and surface drains on the driveway. This new one gets the french drain and rear gutters. That should be enough to handle all of the drainage water

 

Nice! Hopefully this really starts to help with your water problem.

Bet you were glad to have that excavator there to help with the digging lol. That's a lot of dirt, especially clay, to move and even more gravel too.

 

The 60 ft I did by hand was tough, that long run would've been brutal.

I've still got some pooling I need to address, so I might end up digging some of it back up again, to add an additional surface drain.

 

Yeah, the excavator made it easy work for them to get going. Couldn't imagine if they were there all day doing that trench by hand.

With Debby coming up the coast later this week really hoping we get the rear section of the gutters on the garage this week. That is the plan to do those before they do the rest of the garage and the house to help with these water issues. The current prediction for Thursday night into Saturday is for us to get anywhere from 4-10in of rain. Would not be good if the gutters are not on with those walls up. I might actually need to take the wall down if the gutters don't go up.

 

Best of luck, Beryl did a number here, hope you guys get off easy.

I need to look into how tough DIY gutters are, I need to add 3 in a few places [fire pit patio, guest house, Midget carport] to help with some water mgmt.

 

DIY gutters aren't hard but you won't get the seamless gutter thing you get by hiring it out which, IMO, is worth it. It's not overly expensive to get them installed, we did our entire house for ~$2k last year.

 

Yeah, I've got 3 runs, maybe 20-30ft each.
Might look into a couple local installers, at least for the 2 on the house. The Midget 'garage' will probably be DIY either way

 

Definitely let the pros for sure so you get seamless. I think I am paying like $3200 and that is including the higher end gutter guard system. It is pointless really around here if you have pines to do anything other than the high end cause everything has holes that allow pine needles through.

 

Awesome progress, those drains and piping will definitely help with the standing water buildup. Looks great bro!

 

Looks good Jason, hopefully this fixes things and man, we got quoted $3,500 for gutters in 2019 so I'm sure they are $5k now, I need to move. I will say, they had our roof overhang too long so even with 6 inch gutters, they said they wouldn't work well so we didn't do it.

 

Need to post an update this weekend. We are getting a big test from Debby right now and things seem to be going well between that and my temporary custom solution I did myself.

It is odd to me with all the rain that Florida gets that most homes are built without gutters. I guess it is cause of the sandy soil and how well it usually drains. My mom's place down there doesn't have them and she is looking get them. Problem is then she was told that the underground piping would need to be done by a drainage company then as they don't do that. They just dump it onto the ground unless you have that stuff done first. So crazy.

 

Our gutters here just dump on the ground...

But our lots are all graded to force water away, accumulate in a spot, and then drain to somewhere else with gravity. There's essentially a small channel graded in between all the lots on either side of the houses where the water flows to before all going downhill to the drainage pond/wetlands behind my house.

 

With the trigger finally pulled on the new roof and thus soffits and gutters the roof got underway this past Monday.

With all that work happening around the house and me having put off trimming this year with all that was going on with the garage build I ended up doing a rush trim job so these guys had easier access to the house with to get ladders around. It was really over grown. This bush was struggling to grow for the last few years and was also over where we will tie the garage into the septic system so I finally just decided to cut it to the ground. If it grows back next year so be it. If not I will dig out the roots and plant something else.



Not my neatest job but this one was about speed




The roofers showed up on Monday at 6:30am which I was not expecting. By 7am they were setup and tearing the roof off. By 9:30am they had the entire roof down to just the sheeting.









Time for some new underlayment






I thought there had not been any damage found but later it turns out there was. Not much just two small pieces of sheeting replaced. The one on the front of the house was a leak I knew about and the shingles had been patched as it had leaked into my office a few years back. The other one on the back of the house was over the attic and I had no idea about it.








The roof installation did not go without issues. It was not supposed to rain at all last week when they were booked the previous week to do the installation. Rain has been a huge issue on this project and continues to be. It rained twice for about 30min during Monday and obviously the roof was off. Well, no one thought to cover the vents at the top of the pipe vents with anything. I only found out about the leak cause the rain water set off my fire alarm.



Fire alarm in the master bedroom
Soaking wet carpet below
Water was also coming out around one of the AC vents in the master bathroom as well.





Two other spots in the attic


Now waiting a little bit to see how well it dries before I decide if the roofer is going to need to have my drywall redone. I would rather not open up my ceiling in the master but also water means potential mold so not sure if I should bit the bullet vs just touch up the paint.



Going into the garage project I was not planning on paying to have the house roof done but obviously the house damage changed that. Well, they look great matching now and at least I shouldn't need a roof on anything for the next 35-40 years hopefully.

 

We had been also hoping to get the gutters on the garage finally this week but that did not happen before Debby came. The last rain storm put water in the garage once again but with the walls up for the first time and I was not about to deal with that again with them calling for 4-8in of rain for the area. With that coming I took matters into my own hands and made some drip line gutters out of what was laying around the site.

Luckily there was 23ft of double wall 6in pipe still around. Cut in half this gave me 46ft and the back wall was 48ft. Close enough.






This project will go down as the first thing built in the new garage. [img]data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7[/img] I made 7 supports per 23ft section roughly 3.5ft apart. There was a height difference of 2in per set of supports so there was plenty of slope. The ground already naturally sloped some as well.









The first one installed outside and plummed to the new piping installed the week before.







Second one installed





The builder and I had also decided it would be a good idea to uncover the drains that were put in the driveway a couple months ago with the rainfall total we were going to get. It definitely helped.





The gutters worked. The garage stayed dry.








Rain per hour was not as bad as we have had a couple of times during this build so far though it was still a lot of water.







New draing piping dumping water from the temp gutters and the french drain into the the dry creek at the back.





The creek was flowing good on Thursday.









At the heaviest point though even the driveway drain overflowed





Unfortunately, even with some additional work to try and keep the water out of the porch door on the second floor it is still leaking. Builder wants to put a storm door on but I think there has to be something else wrong that can be done to correct this. A storm door would really screw with the stairs and the small porch flow and usability.



In the end we finished with 4.67in of rain in 16hrs.

 

Can't wait to see the finished product, it will all be worth it man.

 

Over the weekend continued to work on the last of my exterior colors. Tried another stain color for the cedar shake and it wasn't what I thought it was so pretty sure I am settled on that.

Started painting two of the shutters other colors. Not totally happy with either. Need to get them to almost combine them to make me something in the middle. One is too light in my mind and the other too dark.



Likely final color of the shake. Surprised how brown it looks next to the shutters cause next to just the exterior paint I had been holding it up to it only looked to have a hint of brown.









Finally yesterday we have gutters. Was not without issue though. They brought the wrong gutter guards. It is at least of my opinion if you don't use the ones with screen mesh then it is pointless and actually even more work with how many pines I have surrounding the property. They also almost left with out putting the down spout in between the two garage doors which I was told I need since each run over the doors was greater than 20ft. Thy also dumped all the second story gutters out onto the roof vs plumbing them into the lower gutter which I was expecting. I had read tons of info stating this is a great way to speed up the wear on your shingles so that will need to be corrected when they come back to put the right gutter guards on.









Last night I finally got around to build a temporary cover for the attic access. Added a little sil seal to hopefully provide a better seal. Need to staple some insulation to the back of it as well.





Original plan was for an attic staircase. I am second guessing this plan though since they are so hard to insulate well and I am not sure how much I will put up there for storage that I even need access to regularly. Right now the only thing planned for up there is my new home for Christmas light storage. If I just trim it out I can insulate it with R38 like the ceiling already is and an extra 8ft ladder to leave up there if I want is only 1/3 of the price of a pull down access as well.

The thought is to do a piece of drywall screwed to a piece of plywood followed by 4 layers of 2in purple foam insulation panel glued together. That would get me R40 while hopefully still being manageable to lift up into the space to get up there. If I make a track system up there with some felt on two 2x4 I should be able to push it up and slide it over and not mesh up the painted drywall.

 

I love this project

 

They came back the following day to install the correct gutter guards and to connect the downspouts to the underground drain lines on the back side of the left of the garage. I waited to do my final inspection till that was all done. Needless to say, I have requested to have almost the entire job redone at this point. The work besides the actual gutters themselves looks like Fisher Price my first gutter install with the lack of craftsmanship and care put into the installation. I put together a length email that day with photos and drone shots of the gutter guard install. They are supposed to come back and and redo almost the entire installation now this week.

Lack of training, common sense, or just zero care I don't know. But literally not a single bracket were the stamped screw holes used.



Upper downspouts all need to be replumbed into the lower gutter



And then there is the gutter guard installs themselves. This is only a couple of pictures but pretty much none of the joints overlap to create a seal. Things don't go all the way to the ends and not even all pieces are secured on both sides of the gutter.











This is so bad it almost has to be intentional





The GC was there on Thursday to get the hole they cut in the concrete and then never used to add an extra drain line as they just tapped into the existing one. I had suggested that at first but they had said at the time this was the only way. Apparently it was not.





While they were here they got the pads leveled and set for the AC install. The AC installer cut the lines too short as the three on the bottom were all supposed to be together and the two on the left were supposed to be closer to the one on the right. I will not have to have a bump in my fence line as the current fence line would go right through the far left unit now.







Another milestone though. The garage is now connected to the house panels. They only call it temp power though. It was just power for the mini splits that are hooked up and then an outlet in each of the first floor rooms. I am unsure why an outlet was not hooked up on the second floor.

No extension cord going between the two structures looks odd

 

That is some super shoddy gutter work. Thankful you have a drone to go up and inspect it easily otherwise it would have gone basically unnoticed until all your gutters clogged up.

Awesome to hear you're now on real power. I'm guessing they have to call it temp power until the inspection is done?

 

Yeah, I'm happy I have the drone for stuff like this. Although that first picture of the gutter guard install was from a bedroom window which is what made me bother even getting the drone out.

I think that is the reason for the temp power but honestly not sure. Inspection could be it but don't know what all needs to be inspected at this point except maybe the connection to the house panels. I wouldn't want them to paint with all the outlets and stuff in so that is another reason why we have only done a little of it.

 

That's terrible work, just absolute carelessness

 

Good lord that gutter and downspout work is hideous, I would be livid

 

Ello Meester George...

 

Finally have AC in the garage. We can now get the building conditioned before doing final drywall mud and paint.







Also with the new roof having gone on I am also having the soffits replaced as well. Since they are off it has given me sometime to run additional wires for hardware cameras around the house. Especially a couple hard to reach locations that I was just going to end up using wifi cameras for on the one side of the house.

I really liked these J hooks I used for the wires in the garage so I decided to get some more for the attic.







With the soffits off I could also secure the speaker wires I had run some years back vs before they just have been tucked into the soffit mounting channel.





Two hardest cameras to run were the east side of the house side and front.





I didn't want to come up short when running these 4 cables but I think I might have added a little to much extra to the runs. I don't mind heights but being up that high on a ladder is not my favorite thing to do.



Large blocking installed for easy mounting of the cameras later.

 

Reminds me, I need to fix/troubleshoot my end cameras. Put in new POE injectors & they're still not coming up

 

That is no good. I don't like using power injectors but it is what I am using right now as well. Hopefully by the end of the year I will have everything moved over to POE switches.

 

I had 2 fail & CS sent me 2 new ones, but they aren't coming up either with the new injectors.
It was 112 heat index yesterday, I'm not too inclined to get in the attic right now

 

There are no words for that shotty gutter work. How does one put that up and say to themselves "that looks good"...

What color are you garage doors going to be? I would try to color match the shutters to the doors.

Everything is coming together very well. Want to come to Wisconsin for a little bit and wire up a camera system for my place? I have no clue what I would be doing for that.

 

These are the garage doors I am doing.


I was going to consider doing them brown but then I need all new shutters. So painting them a darker gray allows me to reuse the ones on the house for a while at least. Worst case I end up hating the look and make my own later on and staining them brown. Whatever color I paint the shutters I will repaint the front door to match. Eventually though I want to put in a fiberglass front door to match the garage doors.

 

Those look like brown to me.

 

The garage doors are brown. He was referencing the shutter sample colors I painted in earlier pictures.

 

Just bustin yer balls a bit. Those look good, and I think will look better in gray.
We had similar [windowless] wood veneered doors on our old house & never liked the dark brown that they were stained. We'd thought about re-doing them in dark gray or black before we ended up moving.

 

Well, this progressed faster than was expected. Stone guys showed up this morning and started prepping the garage. The siding guys were not expected till tomorrow to tear off the siding on the house in prep for stone on there as well. However, their boss told them to show up but they were not sure for what until I told them why.

The garage looked better with just a skim coat hiding the ugly green zip panel. The last of it is officially gone for good.





This is all they had done by lunchtime after getting the waterproofing, screening, skim coat up, as well as stripping most of the house except the large section on the outside of my office of the original stone. It was looking good though.





By the end of the day, they had the entire garage area done as well as most of the stone work on the house garage to match. It doesn't look complete as they are leaving the bottom 12in or so clear until after the concrete is poured. Then they will be back to do that amount. They also still have to install the watertable ledge at the top of the stone where it meets the siding.

 

are they not going to do the stone all the way to the ground? Or are they going to raise the grade at some point?