Garage Before And After

[Civil War Seamstress]

I was feeling mean posting this - almost didn't because my posts are usually upbeat..... as I looked at your photo all I could think of was our 1930's circa garage which fell down 2 years ago.... it to had an old concrete floor. So I am not surprised to hear that no one thinks the garage is worth dealing with.

My husband put wasted effort into trying to save the building, but now it's down, he now sees in hindsight that it wasn't worth saving...

I know. I am a real downer... sorry... just that I have been there.....

[melissakd]

Yes, well. More consultations, shade thrown on the job done by the original fixer-upper fellow (which is too bad because we liked him), angst. $10,000 has already been spent, so nobody likes to just write the thing off, particularly in light of the fact that we could never rebuild anything comparable. Also, as my mother points out, the garden side of the garage makes more fetching scenery than the alley would.

Funny you should mention the concrete, Civ, because our 1930s concrete is SHOT TO YOU-KNOW-WHERE. (A groundhog dug right through it.) You couldn't be more of a downer than reality already is. Feh.

[downtowndahlgren]

Melissa, the interior of my garage looks almost exactly like yours, except it has no floor except dirt and some blue gravel. When I bought my house, the appraiser evaluated the garage as worthless. However, I put a hurricane-proof roof on it to match the house, and have had it repainted and the rotten cedar clapboards replaced as needed. I love the huge rafters that support the hipped roof. It's hard to keep on putting money into a project like this, but I'm still game.

[Don M]

I have spent big bucks on all 5 of our outbuildings; termites had their way with them! I figure if they are there then I should do what I can to save & maintain them.

[melissakd]

We'd be a lot more game to deal with this, but our original plans were based on an incomplete understanding of the financial situation. When the truth came out, my DH merely buried his head in the sand. Now we're stuck.
Plus, as I've said before, this property is not worth restoring. It's old, it's got a moderately interesting history, and it's still standing, but it was never very well-built in the first place, it has no wonderful old details (except the fireplace), and frankly its true calling is as an investment property. From its earliest days (1870s) it was lived in by boarders and renters. It's too big for a single family, unless that family was well-off...in which case they would buy one of the nicer houses in the neighborhood. And it's zoned R-2 (residential two-family) in the city's #1 rental area.

All of my garage's original rafters were rotted and fell apart.

My parents are consulting with a real-estate friend right now about it. We don't even know whether we'd get our money back if we sold it---or whether we COULD sell it in today's market, given what landlords want. [Getting our money back would involve selling for maybe three-quarters of the assessed value.]

[melissakd]

UPDATE
Nothing has been done.
The summer was wasted going in circles between the building department, consultants, the insurance company, and heck knows who else. God bless my mother for undertaking most of the phone calls, etc.
As mentioned, the structural work shown at the beginning of this thread was completely hosed up, so now we have to have it RE-DONE, only MORE SO. (shouting? Ohhh yes I am.) This means that someone has to work on it while it is in an unsafe state. Architect or engineer paid $$$ for assessment, more $$$ to devise remedial plan. The guy we hired to fix it needs us to have thus-and-so clauses in the coverage. Plus if he hires a second guy, is that guy covered, etc. Much backing and forthing, exchange of various documents. Our goal still is to sell it, but we're not wasting any effort on that yet. First we have to get the garage finished...we hope that will be before the snow flies....IN HELL.

MelissaKD