Garage to Barn

Josh and I have always wanted to own a barn. So we decided to make our garage look like one....

This is what it looked like when we bought the house...


Josh and I started to scrape it... but it defeated us. We brought in the big guns. That's right our friend Chris John to the rescue. He was so great, he scraped, painted and trimmed the whole garage. It looks so great now! And the inside has morphed as well into Vintage Steele motorcycle shop.



This was done the end of last summer (2010). Some of the photos represent a number of different stages of the barn-garage.

The Addition

The first room we tackled in the house was a small room off the side of the kitchen that had been added at a later date to the house. Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of the process, but I do have befores and afters.

Yes, that's fake wood paneling, and yes, someone did a two-tone yellow sponging effect over it... also the fake brick vinyl flooring. Nice, huh?

In the above image, you can see the opening over the sink and the doorway into the addition room.

So, we started by tearing everything out of it, the granny rails, the paneling, we took out the small pantry, checked that the brace between the door to the kitchen and the opening over the sink wasn't load-bearing with our friend Saturn, removed the brace, tore out the floors and discovered we had carpenter ants destroying the flooring, and lastly tore out the ceiling and discovered chipmunk nests (pee, poop and all).

This is what it looks like now. With help from Saturn in pulling down the beam, Sarah's brother, Tim, helped finish the tiling when it became clear that Josh and Sarah work well together, just not side-by-side, the room was finished. Most everything came from ReNew (our local building salvage store). The tiles, the bamboo, even the grout. Although some things you just have to get new, such as drywall (walls and ceiling) and presure-treated plywood (to replace the sub-flooring). You can see the back part of the kitchen sink in currently open. Once we get to the kitchen, this will all change.

The light and shelf above the white trashcan were additions this fall (2011).

**NOTE: As I write these catch-up posts, I'm realizing that these are not really in chronological order. Stormy wasn't around when we were eating chickens or fixing lots of the house. This post about our addition room, represents mid-summer 2010.

Just What Happened to June?

Be warned, if you have a soft stomach or prefer not to know where your food comes from, maybe don't participate in this post....

As some of you may know, June was one of our first 13 chickens and one of two Australorps. June, much to my denial, surely turned out to be a rooster. We did as we had before with first Spencer and then Johnny and asked our friend if she had room on her farm for yet another rooster. Sadly, this time she denied us. I can't blame her really, she had her own roosters before we added our own to her troupe. I supposed this meant it was up to us to figure out an alternative route of dealing with unwanted roosters.

Luckily for our friend Chris, we knew just what to do.

I started by doing a bit of internet searching for a do-it-yourself solution. I found this wonderful blog about a family that has done it themselves with detailed instructions. How-to-Butcher-Chicken-Easy-Way helped me figure this all out. Now Josh and I made our own changes to the processes with Chris's help.

There are no pictures of either the butchering or the recipe, we simply forgot to take any... and our hands were full.... and sorry, I can't really remember what I did for the recipe, so I can't share it...