Garage Makeover (Exterior)

So today is day one of my garage's much needed facelift. It blends right in to the background when you look down my driveway and the inside is seriously scary.

See that brown square on the right side of the photo? Yeah, that's my garage. It was built who knows when, but it's too small for modern-day cars so we've just used it as storage.

The vision I have for my garage now is to clean it up, make it look decent on the outside, and useable on the inside because I want to start doing furniture makeovers as a hobby/side-job to fund my home projects so that's plenty of motivation for me because the biggest roadblock when it comes to home improvement (besides the fact that my home is 100 years old and all the complications that come with that) is money.

The list of things that have to be done are as follows. (I'm a list-maker):

1. Tear down the overhead cover thingamajig.
2. Clear all the junk out of the inside.
3. Pressure wash the walls and floors.
4. Paint the garage door.
5. Paint the walls.
6. (Possibly) seal the floor.
7. Install a weather seal on the garage door.
8. Create some storage for paints/stains and materials.
9. And as always, some cute décor!

So the first thing we'll do is tear down the already-falling-apart overhead cover thing. Pretty much everytime it storms really hard, a piece of it falls off. First, it was like half of the underneath part so you can see straight up into it. Then, it was the rain gutter. The garage had to be added later on after the house was already built and the overhead cover on the front was added on after that and it was poorly made. We've got a 4lb sledge hammer and my husband's big muscles so we'll see how it goes.

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Here is a picture of him working on it, day one.

And a picture of it after he called it quits for the day. It started raining and he said, and I quote, "4lbs has never felt so heavy." I lost it, he's funny when he wants to be.

It's not pretty looking, I know, but once all the demo is done we can clean the mess up and pressure wash to get ready for paint. When it's dry, I'll start painting it. It will probably need a few layers, so that could take a day or two. When painting is done, I will install the carriage house door hardware and then BAM. Just like that, the outside part is done. I think it will look great just with some new paint. I mean, look at it. It's not a regular, boring garage door. This garage door has squares on it. Another cool thing about tearing down this front part is that with that left support out of the way, it won't be such a tight squeeze to get to the gate for the backyard so that's pretty sweet. I really wish I could meet the person who did all these weird things to this house and just ask them why.

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Day two, demo work was finished up. Nothing really exciting about it, but I did take this cool video of the majority of it coming down.

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Now that we have the demo work done, we need to clean the outside to prepare for paint. We got all the garbage loaded up into a truck and took it to a transfer station, so that's done. I bought a pressure washer and--surprise--it doesn't work. Something's wrong inside it and the water leaks too much to get a good, strong spray going. So we have to take that back and get a new one. Then we'll clean it, scrape off peeling paint, probably spray it again, and then paint it. My carriage house hardware came in the mail already (yay). Can't wait to see what it looks like cleaned up with a fresh coat of clean, white paint and cute decorative hardware. I'm already obsessed with it.

Here is a pic after demo work, clean-up, paint scraping, and pressure-washing is done.

I spray painted the existing hardware white to match the door so that the black decorative hardware would be the focal point and put painter's tape on the windows to reduce the amount of paint scraping that would have to be done. Then I wiped the ridiculous amount of sweat off my face and called it a day.

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The next day, I started painting. It ended up needing two layers so painting took two days. I finished everything up on the 4th of July.

Here is a pic after the 2nd layer of paint was applied.

After letting it dry for a few hours, we went back outside, installed the hardware, took the tape off the windows, and scraped the paint off. I cleaned the windows and this is the end result.

We used this hardware:

And I just put it where I wanted it and taped it in place. The screws were included, btw.

The paint was Dutch Boy Exterior Primer + Paint, Ultra White from Menards.

It's not perfect by any means, but it's a huge upgrade from what it looked like before and I don't feel embarrassed every time I look at it now, I feel proud. I did that (with some help). It's also a good feeling knowing that there's not a hundred thousand spiders covering it so that's a huge plus as well. I love seeing the images in my head turn into reality. It really turned out great and I'm so happy with it, I highly suggest this makeover to anyone who is thinking about how ugly they think their garage is. It literally only cost me my time, effort, paint ($16.98, after mail-in rebate), and hardware ($10, after $10 gift card).

This was just the outside curb-appeal part of this project. Keep an eye out for part 2 coming as soon as I can get the garage cleared of all the junk it's got inside it. Thanks for reading and if you liked this post and want to see more project tutorials just like this, make sure to share!