Five Years On: Finally Finishing Our Garage Renovation

This project (and post to follow up) has been a long time coming. We got the keys to our house in early March 2020, and the garage renovation has been on the go ever since. The project featured in my 2023 home goals, and in my summer 2021 tying up loose ends at home post. But finally I can say we’re 95% of the way done. So it’s been a long time coming, but my has it been worth it.

We’re lucky to have a double garage, but we weren’t utilising it. We were just filling it up with junk and knew we could make better use of the space. So from the start we decided we were going to split it into three spaces.

One half would be Luke’s ‘office’, or as I like to call it his man cave. A space for him to play games, have his PC and all of his nerdy hobbies in one space. Then the remaining half would be split again, so we had a smaller actual garage space, and then a utility room.

Luke’s ‘office’

We finished this part of the renovation around a year ago and it’s made such a huge difference. It finally gave him his own space in our house, and a chance to have all of stuff out that had been sat in boxes since we moved in.

I have my own office which is full of all my things and I wanted him to have his own space like that. The space is currently a big messy and needs some more organisation in it, but it’s right for the moment.

The final part of our garage renovation: The utility room

For the me the biggest thing was our utility room. We had always had our washing machine and tumble drier in the garage, but it was always in a space that was dusty and didn’t feel like a nice space to have clean washing in.

Luke and his dad started work in the summer but it really ramped up in the final few months of the year. The project started by finishing the build of the final wall, but adding a little hatch into the wall. The main reason for this is our garage doors are electric so if something happens and we can’t get it from the front of the house we need another access point. Especially as the fuse board and Wifi connections are all in there.

Then the floor was levelled and the rest of the frame built out. Away went the cold, cobwebbed walls and ceiling. And in it’s place fresh plasterboard walls and a clean finish. Once that was all done it went pretty quickly from there.

We did start off by tiling the floor but it just wasn’t quite right so we scrapped that idea and went for peel and stick tiles. And they still have the same impact as the tiles we originally picked.

Fitting the room out

After a few trips to Ikea we had everything we needed to build the room out. On the left hand side as you walk in we have a full height larder which we use for overspill products and dishes we don’t use as often. Our fridge sits at the opposite end of that wall with a worktop between the two. Above the worktop and fridge are some wall hung cabinets which house all of our cleaning products alongside things like tissues and toilet paper.

Then Luke built out a surround for our washing machine and tumble drier. We now have a pull out shelf in the middle to put a laundry basket on and a shelf above. Then the cupboard next to it houses our boiler inside, but also our hoover and other items.

Finishing touches for our garage renovation

There are a few tiny bits that need doing to bring the utility to fully complete. As you’ll probably be able to see from the photos the edges of painting aren’t the neatest. But this is because we need to add coving and skirting board to tidy up the bottom and tops of the walls. And we also need to add door surrounds in to tidy up the doors.

Once these bits are done we’re there. But I couldn’t be happier about the room and the utilisation of the space.

One project down, next up our log cabin!