Me vs. Garage Shack

After doing the millionth DIY in my driveway, I figured it was about time to do something about the miserable shack in my backyard that's currently masquerading as a garage. The caveat here is that I'm renting my house, so it makes no financial sense to do a crazy Mazdeuce-like rebuild. I just want to make it nice enough for the 2 years that I'll be living at this house. I might be able to get my landlord to help me out with some stuff, since that'll raise the value of the house for the next renters/buyers.

Currently the "garage" is a detached shack in the backyard... It has no glass in the window, none of the doors close properly (or at all), the roof leaks like crazy, there isn't a single right angle, and it's almost burned down once. Yesterday night the main door fell apart into two pieces.

On the bright side, it has lights and one working outlet. And it's in a fairly sketchy, non-HOA neighborhood, so I can paint/wrench/weld 24/7 without caring about what my neighbors think.

This is what it looked like when I moved in (the open wall got finished shortly after).

Whoever built the garage didn't think it through very well... the L shape of the open space means I can only fit one car in there, and the genius that built it put the door on the shorter side which means I have to carefully drive a car in diagonally to get it inside the garage.

I've still managed to accomplish some projects in the garage, like a super cheap Mustang GT build with a YouTuber friend of mine, painting an M5 bumper for my daily driver 540it, and right now my Porsche 944S project is in the garage.

This is what the garage looks like now, after several rainstorms. I've had to throw tarps on a bunch of things and it's quite damp all around. The leaky roof has forced me to store a bunch of things inside the house, much to the annoyance of my girlfriend. I've also been parting out a 540it so the parts for that are starting to pile up everywhere. And last night I killed a giant roach with brake cleaner.

(Note the wooden board keeping the door closed since the door frame is so woefully out of shape that the door doesn't even latch)

Right now I'm thinking of taking a two-fold approach. The first part would be to just clean up and get organized, which doesn't cost me anything other than time (which I have plenty of). A coworker gave me some metal shelves for free, so I'll be able to put those up once I clear out some floor space. The second part would be more structural stuff, like making the roof waterproof, putting some glass or plastic in the window frame, devising a way to actually lock the garage to keep my tools secure, and possibly relocating the main door or adding a second door to make better use of the space.

The main reason I wanted to create a thread about it is to keep me motivated. Otherwise I just end up staring at my garage and feeling hopeless about it.

Anybody else dealing with a nightmare garage?

I refer to my dad's garage here as the little shop of horrors. Along with the obvious clutter issues. Every window is busted, it had a roll up door but the tracks got bent and the door fell off the tracks nearly taking out me and the back window my old '86 Firebird at the same time. As I've mentioned in another thread it also has problem with insects of the flying stinger wielding variety. The bright side is the building itself is great, mostly level concrete floors,big enough to store multiple cars if space is used correctly. insulated walls, wood stove. Even has a bathroom. (It's not plumbed but it's there). Basically after I finally give up and call somebody smarter than me to deal with the insect issue and do a bit of cleaning, it won't be bad at all.

Talk to your landlord about the roof. If nobody fixes that the whole structure will eventually fail and that's no good for anyone. Once it's dry, move on to the next priority.

Chadeux wrote: I refer to my dad's garage here as the little shop of horrors. Along with the obvious clutter issues. Every window is busted, it had a roll up door but the tracks got bent and the door fell off the tracks nearly taking out me and the back window my old '86 Firebird at the same time. As I've mentioned in another thread it also has problem with insects of the flying stinger wielding variety. The bright side is the building itself is great, mostly level concrete floors,big enough to store multiple cars if space is used correctly. insulated walls, wood stove. Even has a bathroom. (It's not plumbed but it's there). Basically after I finally give up and call somebody smarter than me to deal with the insect issue and do a bit of cleaning, it won't be bad at all.

Hey, at least in your case you have something with potential. Even if I fix up this shack nicely, it'll still be a shoddy shack. And I have things that fly too— my roaches fly sometimes. That's when I contemplate burning the whole thing down.

mazdeuce wrote: Talk to your landlord about the roof. If nobody fixes that the whole structure will eventually fail and that's no good for anyone. Once it's dry, move on to the next priority.

Yeah, that's a good point. If I phrase it like that versus "it would be real nice if my roof didn't leak" then my landlord will be a lot more likely to take action. Right now I have a mini freakout every time it rains, because I have a lot of stuff in the garage that really shouldn't be getting wet. Sometimes little burnt chunks of roof fall off too, I've found a few on top of the Porsche.

I think your shed a potential. I second talking to your landlord. See if he'll pay for mat'ls if you do the work. Fix the roof, add some storage, and you'll have a nice dry place to work.

I would talk to the landlord but get permission and scope in writing. My experience is that people who are willing to let a building go from laziness are also willing to sue you later when the thing eventually fails. Without permission and permits and 3rd party inspections there is nothing to stop them from claiming their perfectly good structure failed because you did unauthorized work.

Chadeux wrote: ...Even has a bathroom. (It's not plumbed but it's there).

How does one arrive at this situation? Build the entire structure and then say, "hey, a bathroom would be nice; I think I'll sit this toilet and sink in here and someday dig up the floor to add the water and sewage lines."

Start on the roof first then move to other parts of the shop.

In reply to kb58:

I'm guessing at some point someone had a leftover toilet and stuff so they made a spot for it, figuring they'll plumb it in and make it usable later.

Looks like the consensus is to fix the roof first, which makes sense. I'm going to get my landlord over there next weekend, and I'll clean the place up in the meantime so I don't look like a hoarder.

kb58 wrote:

Chadeux wrote: ...Even has a bathroom. (It's not plumbed but it's there).

How does one arrive at this situation? Build the entire structure and *then* say, "hey, a bathroom would be nice; I think I'll sit this toilet and sink in here and someday dig up the floor to add the water and sewage lines."

That's exactly what happened. I didn't do it.