The Garage Demise, part 1

Those of you who have been to the house know we have a detached 2-car garage. It has a flat roof, it is built into the hill, and it needs to come down very badly. We want to do it in a structured way before it decides to come down itself.

This is the story of its demise.

First, I want to show some pictures of its situation, location, and problems. As you I think know, we are situated on a fairly steep hill. In the picture below, taken a while ago, you can see the garage from the side. The house is on the left:
This picture is looking down the hill from the top of the yard. The flat garage roof is visible with a coil of orange something on top:

This view is from the other side of the garage, the house is on the right this time:
This is clean-out day. The garage roof leaked, and it was like a cave in there. A LOT of stuff was ruined, and it is painful to me to even think about. We salvaged what we could, but wound up taking a full pickup truck-load of stuff to the dump:

Mostly cleaned out now. See that door in the back? Keep watching....

That door in the back goes to the root cellar. In the first picture above, you can see the roof of it (where the woodpile is). Since this picture was taken, Matt has already poured a concrete floor for it. We're not sure yet if we will use it for food storage or as a wine/beer storage. Or maybe both!


If you remember from a previous post, the pine trees behind the garage were taken out earlier this year. The weight of the trees and their roots, and the bank of dirt has pushed in the walls of the garage and it keeps getting progressivly worse:

That isn't an optical illusion, the wall really is bowing in that much:

So, you can see why it has to come down.

In Part 2, we start digging the banks away!