Garage improvements

I shifted the rest of the curse word along the brick wall and painted it with some random white paint I found! The only walls that aren't painted now are the ones under the cabinet, under the bench, and behind the tool boards.


I'm trying to work out just how big a car I can fit in here. I have my eye on something that is 4.28m long and 1.7m wide, and I reckon if I can get it in there, it might be touching the wall and the garage door at the same time! Is it possible to get a power bulge in a garage door?
If I want that car, I'll definitely have to move the bench along the diagonal (even folding it down would probably rob too much space!), so I need to get as much curse word as possible out of the garage and work out where to put it.Life would be so much easier if the garage was rectangular!

I'd be interested to see how you could do that. I reckon there would be a whole pile of planning issues to make anything permanent, given it's built into the house and the whole street is the same sort of front. Here's a really old picture from when we'd first moved in and my Beta Spyder was in residence.

There is an added complication of a soakaway drain about 1 metre in front of the garage in the middle of the drive (hidden by the blue Skoda in the picture). If that blocks up then the garage floods.
FWIW, I straightened the bottom of the garage door a few days ago with a big piece of box section and a trolley jack!

I'd need to check whether it's a covenant or actual planning permission. I guess either way I could get some sort of storage box - make it nice and short so it's definitely not a shed.
To self level the floor, I guess I'd need to get everything out of there before I can start. That would take a lot of work (and need a few sunny days - one for moving stuff, one for screeding and one for putting it all back - I wouldn't fancy leaving the tumble drier outside in the current monsoon!).

Minor progress made over the last couple of days. Yesterday I painted the wall around the tool board and moved some rarely used stuff from that shelf into the loft, and today I moved everything against the brick wall and finished the painting. I got a bit fed up with white paint, so I went a bit mad with some other paint I found!



The only painting left is the angled wall where the bench is (I'm not painting behind the back-wall bench), but I'll have to clear everything else up before I can take that bench down.

I also got some heavy duty wall brackets, so I'm going to be installing a shelf on the end wall and another around the side when I get a chance to drill some holes without my wife complaining! Might get rid of the flymo and the strimmer and resort to cutting the grass with some shears - I don't use them very often and it would save loads of space! The only remaining proper obstacle is the homemade trike - it's too big and heavy! Maybe I can hang it on the wall if I strip the front wheels (and uprights).

I clamp my clamps to my bench legs.

The garage is basically clear enough to fit a car in it now (with a few last minute evictions once I actually have a car to fit in there). Sadly, the car I was planning on collecting wasn't as good as I thought it was, so didn't come home with me. So the garage is still waiting (and I'm waiting on the car before I work out where the other bench will go or if it folds). At least it looks a lot nicer.

Epoxy resin flooring would be the way forward for the floor but I’d maybe build something in at the end by the door like a small angle iron ? To screed to and raise it enough to stop any flood ingress

That stuff looks really cool, and if the concrete base was flatter then it would probably be great, but the epoxy is only supposed to be 1.7mm thick, and the surface is way more lumpy than that. I think the only way to make it flat and level would be to screed it - if flat without level was fine then one of those polishing tools would probably be sufficient. Either could do with having epoxy or floor tiles put on top once complete.

It's a bigger project than I'm able to do right now. I'm currently just trying to seal all the edges and cracks so no smell leaks into the house - I'll post a picture of the boxed in and sealed corner when I've finished it today. It's not pretty, but hopefully it will work...

I think I found where the hole into the house was. I moved my workbench because behind it was the last place I hadn't painted, and I discovered this:



So I attacked the hole with expanding foam, hopefully this will mean there is no smell in the house when I put my car in the garage now...


Fingers crossed this works, now all I need to do is return the workbench and tidy the rest of the garage again!

I finally tested the smell-proof modifications by chucking a load of olbas oil in yoghurt pots in the garage and shutting the door. No menthol smells in the house, so I got permission to put the car in the garage - result.
The very next day, I discovered I couldn't open the tumble drier door because the car was in the way, so it had to come back out again.
I've re-arranged loads of stuff in the garage, so I can rotate the tumble drier 90 degrees and still open the door (and the little hatch to take the water tray out). I've not tested that works yet though - I will give it a go today and try to remember to get a picture of the final result. The only minor issue is that I have too many bikes - there are 4 outside under a shelter ( I can't fit any more under there now) and 2 in the garage. If I could store one of the garage ones elsewhere then I might even be able to get to my workbench!