Home improvement project

billzhao

The covid 19 pandemics closed all schools, including the one where I worked. A lot of time is available, but how to spend it? Travel is banned everywhere in Canada. In fact I could drive to Yellow Knife or High Level to watch the northern lights, but I gave up the tantalizing idea, not only for the reason of safety, but also because I found something more significant to do.

The following is a picture of the front of my garage which is over 50 years old and in really bad shape. You can see the driveway was full of wide cracks and wild grass grow happily there. It is an eye sore, and that is why I parked my car in front of the house. Also I could not use the garage because it was used as a storage by a friend. Just recently my friend returned the garage back to me. Now I have a project, and I was ready.
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The first thing to do is to fill in the cracks and resurface the driveway. I bought 20 bags of concrete resurfacer and one barrel of concrete fillers from home depot. I filled in the cracks first and made the surface even. Then I resurfaced the driveway with the concrete mixed with water. It looks decent after done, although not as nice as a newly poured concrete. I might pour new concrete if the resurfacer did not stick for long. Fingers are crossed that it can stay for a couple of years. I do not have a picture of the new driveway, but you can see it from the finished project.

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The garage originally had two garage doors. Nowadays one two-car garage door is more popular, and more convenient to park cars. I looked for people who would like to do the conversion. A tradesman from Kijiji quoted $4,500 to do the framing only. Another two quotes were about $2500 for the conversion. I googled YouTube and watched some videos. You can learn anything from YouTube, really. The project might look intimidating, but I was ready to challenge myself.

I bought three 19 feet 2 by 10 LVL beams, which had to be delivered to the site because my SUV had no way to haul 19 feet. It only cost me less than $500 to buy the supplies. It took me half a day to demolish the header and another half day to raise the beams onto the support walls I just built. The following pictures showed the finished conversion.

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' Q& I" ^7 u% S% MI could install a new garage door myself but I decided that the door and the opener should be installed by a professional. The only concern was that the door might not function properly. It was not worth the risk. But in the future if chances come, I may do it myself, because I observed the whole process of installation and I know all the details of how to do it.
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Before the installer could come for the work, I had to do some preparations, such as wrapping the header and the walls with sidings, equalizing the opening size to that of the real door, flushing the inside walls so that the garage door can be properly installed.

It was raining hard when the installer came to do the installation. It was also very cold. I had to put on winter jackets while watching and chatting with the guy. He was really good at this because he has been doing the job for over 20 years. He was not too chatty but he shared some personal information with me such as that he is a single parent and he has five kids to take care of. When we talked about that it was good and bad that students would definitely pass without working hard due to the pandemics, he took out his phone and called his son who was still in bed. "Get up to do your school work."
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' D8 ?$ I' V5 a, J  ]& p1 qThe next day it was still raining, I took the time to make some storage shelves.
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The man door was also in bad shape. You can image how bad it was, I do not have a picture to match any image in your head. I bought a new metal door from home depot. The original door was 30 inches wide, but the smallest metal door available was 32 inches wide. It was ok for me, because I can reframe the door opening, as I did with the old two garage door openings.
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The following was the newly installed metal door.
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8 ]; S& c: r( c$ ^5 [) X" nThe last step was to paint the sidings with exterior paint. Paining was the easiest among all the jobs done, just be willing to throw away the shirt and pants which will definitely get painted as well
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The following are some pictures of the finished project.
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kryptonshen

做得很好！赞一个！

落日圆

phxphxphx

漂亮！！！

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