Double Garage Build

[RumHam]

Hi
Long time lurker, first time poster.
We bought a dilapidated house about 5 years ago and finished it early last year. Now it’s time to build a garage, I promised myself no more car work in the road especially as we always seem to live on a bus route!

This thread is catching up on the last year of graft. I’m on a tight budget and will try and share any money saving tips I have found.

I bought the garage first as it came up at a decent price. I’ve gone the sectional concrete garage route for these reasons:
Cost
Ease of assembly by myself
Cost
Planning rules
Cost
I know they have their drawbacks but I’m hoping to mitigate them.


The garden was in a right state when I started, the rear 1/4 was a mix of concrete varying in depth from 2mm to 2 feet. Within the concrete I found; 2 bikes, gardening tools, chip pans, a green houses worth of glass (it was never ending and a nightmare) and also part of a bomb. The last one was not ideal as the police and bomb squad had to attend. Turned out it was the cap that screwed into the top and to think I was just going to lob it in the scrap bin at work!

Heres my first crack at loading photos;



starting point of garden



Top part of da bomb

Lots more to follow

[RumHam]

I ended up removing all of the concrete and digging the base by hand. The idea was to reuse the concrete as hardcore for the sub base.
The garage I bought is 5m wide by 6m long.

Initially I was going to do just the base of the garage first. This is where things went a bit belly up, I had a relatively bad injury at work - who knew table saws were that sharp?! After healing up from this I was back in the game and at a stage where I was ready to lay the sub base, by this point it was late summer, my brainwave was to hire a mobile crusher to break the hardcore down into a nice finer grade for compacting.







The crusher is diesel powered and can fit through a door way - great, only problem was it was so long that going up any sort of gradient meant that the conveyor was well above the roof of the existing outbuildings (an old out doors toilet and two brick built sheds). Sadly returned the crusher unused to a very understanding hire firm.

Ok now time to rethink the whole project……. More to come

[joem83]

You have my sympathy with glass in the ground, we cleared our garden of a 1930's greenhouse and were still finding glass about 18" down. Nightmare.

[homersimpson]

Mar 27, 2022 9:40:39 GMT joem83 said:

You have my sympathy with glass in the ground, we cleared our garden of a 1930's greenhouse and were still finding glass about 18" down. Nightmare.

Wasn't there something about people putting glass on the ground to deter slugs in green houses?

[clanger]

There was a "going green" TV program from back in the 90's that talked about burying broken glass in a green house floor to create a heat store.

[joem83]

Mar 27, 2022 11:23:32 GMT homersimpson said:

Mar 27, 2022 9:40:39 GMT joem83 said:

You have my sympathy with glass in the ground, we cleared our garden of a 1930's greenhouse and were still finding glass about 18" down. Nightmare.

Wasn't there something about people putting glass on the ground to deter slugs in green houses?

I don't know, it was under the concrete lol

[twincammy]

following*

thats magic about the mobile crusher, i had no idea you could rent such a thing! i went through this process over the last few years and could of done with one of these.

(i reduced the size of a sectional garage, and smashed half up with a sledgehammer to put under my driveway )

[slater]

I don't get what was wrong with the crusher?

[colnerov]

Hi, Too tall for the access available. Then of course there would have been the noise.

Colin

[henspeed]

Mar 26, 2022 16:45:05 GMT RumHam said:

I am not sure the safety boots meet the british standard
Nice nails though

[mrbig]

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses. I know there can be issues with sectional garages, but I've always figured you could tank one, fill the voids with kingspan or similar, then board the inside. Put some vents in under the roof overhang and you'd be good surely?

[jjp666]

Mar 29, 2022 10:52:33 GMT henspeed said:

Mar 26, 2022 16:45:05 GMT RumHam said:

I am not sure the safety boots meet the british standard
Nice nails though

grizz approved

[homersimpson]

Mar 29, 2022 15:20:10 GMT mrbig said:

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses. I know there can be issues with sectional garages, but I've always figured you could tank one, fill the voids with kingspan or similar, then board the inside. Put some vents in under the roof overhang and you'd be good surely?

I had one and the biggest mistake I made was having an uninsulated metal roof which sweated like mad in the winter, if I had another one I would spend the extra on insulated roofing panels as it would make a huge difference.

[henspeed]

My garage has an uninsulated tin roof, not seen any sweating yet, but it is a big space and a 45 degree slop which helps

[kevins]

On mine it was the fibre concrete roof sheets which dripped condensation, also it was alkali so damaged paint. Fitted a felted timber roof and ply lined the walls, been fine since. If I were doing it again now I would probably line it with multifoil behind the ply.

[RumHam]

I realise I may be trying to put posts up without explaining some aspects probably, also need to figure out how to ‘tag’ people in replies.
Joem83, homersimpson and clanger; really good theories about why the glass was in there. At least some logic to it!
Twincammy; not to spoil later posts but the crusher was better than I could have hoped for.
Slater; this is what I should have explained better. Alongside my house there are some outbuildings with an alley and some steps. Although I could fit the crusher up the alley (just) as soon as it went up the scaffold boards due to its length and overhang of the conveyor by the time the tracks got to the top of the ramp the conveyor was well over 2.5 meters in the air and colliding with the poxy bit of roofing that bridged the house to the lean to.
Colnerov; your pretty much correct (see above) and the noise was to come.
Henspeed; not really my colour, I’m more of a salmon pink man myself.
Homersimpson, henspeed,Kevin’s; the roofing is a tricky one. I have already bought some box profiling Galv sheeting despite the risks. This was purely cost driven as I’m sure we’re all aware of rocketing material prices at the mo. If condensation becomes an issues I’ve got some ideas involving solar panels and fans etc but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Back to it. By this point it was late summer 2021 and I had just come very close to installing a mobile crusher into my front room, it was time for a rethink.
For once I had a bit of luck, my Mrs got chatting to friendly farmer who let me store the project car and my tooling/machinery for a bit. After a strict scrapping/selling session I managed to get the outbuildings empty to then demolish these, to then allow better access for the crusher in the future. I was hell bent on using the crusher as I could not see the sense in paying to get rid of a load of concrete to then pay for a load of type 1 or whatever and carry both lots up and down the garden.

Unfortunately this meant getting rid of the old asbestos roof on the plus side the house was finally free of the last of it.

I cry demolition


Outbuildings empty


Outbuildings Roofless

[RumHam]

As you can see one of the walls of the buildings was actually the front wall of the property. Time to make some gates. I did this out of hours at work when not digging. Speaking of the digging at this point I decided not just dig the base for the garage but also the patio to the side. This resulted in the footings being approx 6m deep by 8.5m wide.

At this point it is Xmas 2021.
In the interest of transparency I always find it helps to include costs if I forget then just ask.
Double garage: £600, £300 for garage, £300 for delivery. Delivery price was the best £300 I have ever spent since I have now carried it up to the end of the garden!!!
Crusher hire £400 approx for 3 days
Digging; I already had a spade and I bought a mattock for £25 pound for pound the best ‘outdoors’ tool I have ever purchased.
Asbestos removal; I think £500
Gates £100 for the wood panelling, I was lucky that the metal I got for nothing as a job for job favour type situation

This was spread over a calendar year or I could not have done it.



I spent the Xmas break demolishing the last of the wall and fitting the gates. The gates came out ok, I think in future I will redo the wood panelling after chucking it through a thicknesser as apparently it’s too much to expect straight and flat wood nowadays no matter the cost.

[RumHam]

I’ve just realised that’s an old photo of the gates, the wood has been repainted since then as Ron seal garden paint is absolute pisswater and a complete waste of money.

[RumHam]

In the interest of transparency I did make quite a cock up on the gates which although not terminal was very annoying. I’ll post up another photo to explain. I find it helps to post up your mistakes as I am certainly not perfect and have not done a project of this scale before.

At this point my front garden was ridiculous, I had a double garage in pieces (all 42 of them) approx 4 tonnes of earth, half of the concrete from demolishing the side buildings (half had gone up the back garden but the pile had grown to such an extent I thought the footings no matter how big or deep would take it all).

Money saving tip: grab hire. I found that grab hire was easier as no loading a skip and cheaper. I had the load of concrete picked up first, £170 bargain! Unfortunately this would lead to a bit of a cock up later on.

By this time it was January and time to add to that dirt pile out the front. I know there was a thread in the chat room about mojo/motivation at this point I needed all I could get! I am a bit advocate for the hour a day method, I figured I could do 5 barrow loads in an hour, times that by 5 nights a week(a few more on Friday as let’s be honest I was powered by beer!). It was not easy, it was cold, dark and pretty bleak.

One worthwhile investment though was a string of builders type site lights for £50, I got about 20m worth and could not have done it without them.


Progress shot

[dazcapri]

Looking good so far mate to tag someone put @ in front of their username as in RumHam