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Our house was built in the 50s and we’ve renovated inside, but now it’s time to tackle the backyard...
We’ve decided that the double car garage, which has a leaky roof and some significant cracks in the concrete floor and daylight between some of the bricks in the walls, is beyond saving. We don’t use it to house the cars as the driveway is a little too narrow to get cars up and down every day.
It’s primarily been used by the kids for table tennis and pool, as well as a place to store bikes, tools and a whole lot of junk.
We’ve decided to install a pool and build a new games room/teenage retreat with a similar footprint to the old garage.
We wanted a flexible space that will primarily be used for entertaining but could be an additional bedroom or granny flat if we needed it to be. We need part of it to be storage and it also seemed wise to include a toilet and bathroom, particularly as we only have one inside.
The first step has been to sell what we can on eBay and throw out anything we haven’t used for a while.
The second step was realising that we’d get a much better result using a friend who is an architect, which has been an interesting process.
Here’s the first design we came up with, which we’ve now had to change to reduce costs… Sadly, we've had to delete the special bricks which had a circular hole - we were going to install glass behind them but the cost was too high.
I’ll give updates as we progress with the build.
Jason
More painting over the weekend. Painted the skirting boards and just now need to do a couple of doors and the final coat on the walls.
Last week the concrete floor got its final polish and was sealed. This is how it's come up:
After a bit of a hiatus on the project I spent much of the weekend on finishing touches. All the nail holes on the door frames and skirting boards needed filling, then I did another coat of paint after sanding. I also did a couple of coats on the bathroom door and an external door frame. Not far to go now... Biggest task remaining is paving.
We can't take much credit @Andy_Mann, we've had a great builder do most of the work. We've just been doing as much as we can to keep the costs down. Looking forward to being able to make the most of it. I did a bit more painting on the weekend - nearly there!
Depending where you live, you might try facebook, there are a number of buy/sell/swap sites/pages. I found my bunk beds there for 80$ and they are great as the top bunk is about 12 ins higher than normal so more head space for bottom bed.
I found gumtree hard to search.... or should I say I can search on gumtree. I put in my filters and upto 100kms.... and I still have posts from Melb and Bendigo and sometimes NSW so it can be frustrating. but I have bought good thing there..
Or check out Facebook, for a buy/swap/sell in your area 
Good luck
Looks great, ptiy about the brick wall.
Could you get a similar look with poly pipe and perspex or what ever it is called today..
I did a mini partition, years ago, and your photo reminded me of it. we had solid [I think it was pespex- see through plastic] with a couple of sound holes cut out,, so we went further, made the holes different sizes, as we had off cuts form different size polly pipe [plastic pipe - the stuff used for drains or in garden]. and it turned out quite good.... and cheap seeing we had the stuff offlaoaded. And of course we had someone who knew how to cut etc. Pity I never took a photo of that... But keeping yours to remind me [if thats ok] as I have poly pipe and the solid pespex lying around and I could do some of the pipe on an angle and have a weird planter wall..
thanks for posting, has given me another idea on how to recycle some of the stuff that is not sellable
Janina
Have nearly finished painting... Just want to have another go at the bathroom door frame. Happy with how its looking now and looking forward to paving starting later in the week.
Overdue update: all finished now. Just a few things to clean up and obviously need to furnish the room. Really happy with the end result.
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