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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
Hi @cupofchloe,
I'm always amazed at how well things do on eBay. I've never used Gumtree because I've always been happy with the results from eBay, eventhough the fees are obviously higher. I probably didn't throw enough stuff out as our storage under the house is now packed, so will have another round when we're setting up thew new storage room and work out what fits and what we can live without.
We are adding a fibreglass pool. We are doing the dig in a couple of weeks. It's starting to get exciting!
Jason
Thanks @maknilsin.
Our house was built in the mid-50s. It's a cream brick veneer that we've renovated. (I've previously shared our kitchen and bathroom updates.)
We decided to do something that's a significant contrast. It's meant to be a relaxing, fun space. We thought the bathroom would be a wise addition as we only have one in the house and it means the room can be used as a granny flat.
Jason
Found out yesterday why these trees were so healthy.
There was a tree root ball in the sewer. The plumber reckons we were only a few months away from a completely blocked sewer. Lucky we decided to move/replace it!
The backyard is now a major disaster zone.
Have done the first (wet) grind of the concrete floor. Very happy with how the aggregate looks. Final (dry) polish will be done at the end.
