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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
Thanks for joining in the discussion @fpower77. And welcome to Workshop. Perhaps you'd also like to introduce yourself to the community?
Feel free to post anytime you need a hand or have something to share.
Jason
Many thanks for the feedback @johnw2016, much appreciated.
Let us know if you would like to do something similar. I'm sure there will be plenty of Workshop members more than happy to share ideas and inspiration for you.
Welcome to the community. We're really pleased to have you join us and look forward to reading all about your own projects and plans. Feel free to post whenever you need a hand with anything or have something to share.
Jason
Thought an update of how the garden is looking these days is a bit overdue. This was five years ago when we took out everything:
And here's a shot from the same angle today:
If you need a hand with your own backyard project, check out @Adam_W's guide How to plan a garden makeover and feel free to hit the Start a discussion button for some advice.
Jason
