The Trials and Tribulations of Creating a Homestead – Part 3: Workshop, Garage and Gutters

Now, you might think that all we have had are problems since we started doing this.  That’s not the case, it just seems like it sometimes.  For example, when we finally got a garage door on the garage and a roll-down door on the workshop, the first thing we did was to move stuff from the storage space where we had been keeping it, up to the garage/workshop space under the house.  We loaded up my husband’s pickup truck several times and got everything transported!

My dad had been an avid maker of all kinds of things.  He helped me build a table with bookshelves before I went off to college.  He taught himself how to reupholster furniture and use a knitting machine.  When he got interested in rocks and stones, he got the equipment to grind and polish them and made me a ring from agate that I still have.  He also made other pieces of jewelry for my mom and sisters, but I don’t know what happened to those things.

Dad liked to work with wood and had lots of tools stored in the garage of his house when he passed away.  My husband also likes to do woodworking, so he got as many of those tools as he could, when they were available.   My father never loaned his tools to anyone and was even reluctant to let me or my siblings handle anything but the most basic items for fear that we would break them.  My husband would still have no access to the tools in my father’s garage if Dad was still alive!

In addition to tools, we got my dad’s workbenches, a functioning radial arm saw, a number of pieces of furniture which I liked, and artwork — both purchased and created by me or my dad that was in his house.  Some of my favorites are a pair of oil paintings that he and I did together, a large piece of burlap I embroidered with an underwater scene in fifth grade, a large oil painting of a homestead in the mountains which had been in my dad’s living room, and three paintings of scenes from Thailand on black linen that date back to the Vietnam War period.  The last group had been rolled up in a cardboard tube and had never been framed, until I did that recently.

One of our priorities on the ground floor was setting up my husband’s workshop – so he could get to work!  We put all of the relevant items in that space and moved everything that was not designated for the workshop into the garage and started organizing.  Glass jars with metal lids were used for smaller, similar items like screws, nails, etc.  Bigger items went into large plastic tubs.  Over the course of a weekend or so, both areas were looking much better.

My husband also put up shelves and pegboards to keep certain regularly used tools more visible and a metal bracket to hold up our bikes was installed in one corner of the garage.  I went through all of the things that we stored in the garage to decide what to keep and what to discard.  A number of glass jars were chosen for recycling.  The rest were packed so that we could reach them easily when they were needed.  Additionally, we installed the solar lights which were waiting in the garage on the rail of the steps to our deck.

We also separated out all the cardboard boxes that were used during the final move to our new house, those would eventually be recycled into our garden to prevent grass from growing in our raised beds. Finally, the garage was organized so that my husband’s truck, my car, and our motorcycle all fit inside!  Getting both the garage and workshop straightened up was a big win!

The last thing I want to talk about in Part 3 is the gutters.  I tried calling several gutter companies about installing gutters on my house.  They asked if the edge of the roof was cut perpendicular to the ground, and unfortunately, it was not.  This makes gutter installation tricky, but I didn’t think it would be impossible.  I found a product that would adjust the angle between the gutters and the roof edge that would allow the gutters to catch the water.  We got the necessary pieces and went to work fashioning gutters for two sides of the house.  The final result was obviously not the work of professionals, but I thought it would do.  What I didn’t consider was the gap that might exist between the roof and the gutters which would allow water to drip between them and onto the deck.  This is a problem we are still trying to fix.

We also got leaf guards which would have worked with a standard installation, but not with what we had.  I asked my husband if we could use duct tape to secure one edge to the roof so the other side would cover the gutter opening and allow water to go into the gutter without leaves.  In the few months since this was done, the leaves and pine needles have forced up the gutter guard pulling the duct tape off the roof.  This is going to require more work to sort out so that we can collect rainwater for future use.  I feel certain that a solution is possible, but it may require some professional assistance.