In the late 1960s after my parents divorce and my mother's taking a lover who was a friend of my current husband's and only a three years older than I, the garage began to be used as a workshop and hideout for asshole men who had been temporarily been asked to go drink somewhere else by their long suffering female partners. The garage had electricity so the boys could have a huge old fridge and a TV to watch sporting events while they drank beer or "Crybaby" wine. When the gang of drunks began to move away with new women (suckers) to other parts of the state or country, and my mother's very young lover died of a brain tumor, the garage again languished as a big storage pod.
When Tom and I had one of our many falling-outs I decided to remodel the garage and turn it into a cottage/art studio ( I was painting in those days). I wish I had pictures of the transition. It was a huge undertaking. For one thing the garage and the entire back third of the property was situated on a gradual rise full of rocks and deep tree-roots. There were plantings of antique lilacs and thorny shrubs. There are two huge pines back here. And to complicate things a bit, huge slabs of slate had been deposited by my ex-father when he tore out the original antique mantel and fireplace and made the whole fireplace-room dark as a cave and butt ugly. The slate hearth he built was nothing more than a tripping hazard. When my mother's young lover took up residence, he tore out my ex-father's hidious low acoustical tile ceiling and opened up the bay windows again. He also tore out the slate fireplace and replaced it with a mantle he and my mother found at a garage sale. It wasn't as pretty as the original, but it is a huge improvement on the slate slabs which my mother's young lover stashed in random sections of the back of the property (as if they were naturally occurring in this soil).
So when I began the excavation for the bathroom/solarium addition to the garage I had to do several very big jobs with very little help and even less money. A girlfriend and I dug the utility trench from the main house to the garage. In a climate like this utility lines (gas and water) are buried six feet under. And these particular six feet run under a pathway that has been used since the late 1800s. They also run beside the biggest Green Ash tree in the Salt Lake Valley. So not only did we have to dig that trench, we had to dig around roots as big as a weight lifter's thigh. We used shovels until we got to the tree roots and then we used coffee cans. So we dug a trench three feet wide and six feet underground and roughly eighty five feet long. We worked from dawn to dusk for two weeks. If Tom had been doing this remodel he'd have rented a backhoe and dug the trench in a day.
Then my friend and I made the gazebo from a kit she bought ages ago and never used. The kit itself was simple, but preparing the ground for it was not. More digging was required along with moving slabs of slate. Then, once the area had been leveled and the beams in place, we mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow and made five triangular sections of floor. Putting the kit together was simple compared to the mixing and pouring of concrete one wheelbarrow at a time. It took three wheelbarrows full for each triangular section. You do the math. Just writing this is making my back ache a little more.
It took most of one summer to do this much, and as winter was approaching we used particle board and my friend's table saw to make the fourteen triangular sides of the structure and then wrestle them into place(leaving one side open as a door) and hammer them securely enough to weather the winter and protect all the tools and antiques that had been stored in the garage so the actual remodel could begin.
To be continued...
