I designed it, he built it: Garage to Loft in 4 months!

Renovation feels a lot like planning a wedding, but so much worse. If you choose the wrong dress, you only have to wear it for one day...but if you plan the wrong layout, flooring and fixtures?? Well, you're kinda stuck with it.

First, some background.

When we were in the market for a house last year, we were more concerned with lot size than house size. It made more financial sense for us to renovate/add-on and have something that could grow with us.

Good thing I married a man who knows how to make things like that possible. His main profession is in the medical field (Medic at Kaiser primarily, medical device sales secondly), but his passion is in construction and real estate. He comes from a family of contractors, and grew up in a marginalized neighborhood in West Oakland where families in his community took turns to build each others homes.

Long story short. By the grace of God, we found a modest 3bd/2bath 1,840 sq ft Tudor Style home on an 8,900 sq ft lot (!!), right near the Oakland Zoo. With 14 other offers, and a cash offer $70k higher than ours, we still landed the house.

The house had been in the homeowner's family for decades and they wanted to sell it to someone who would care for it just as much. After a phone interview with Shobab, and discovering connections in all kinds of ways (no surprise there), the homeowner took favor in our little family. Not even a counter offer, she said it was ours.

On August 15th, 2015, we officially became homeowners...along with an entirely new set of headaches that comes with a home built in 1929.

At first sight, Shobab had a vision of what he wanted to do: Turn the garage into a studio loft, extend the basement, build a bigger deck, add tiers to the sloped back yard to accommodate a garden, play yard, BBQ area and half of a hoop court.

Of course, all of this takes $$$...and lots of it. After a ton of planning, another loan, some financial juggling and major career opportunities, we began the garage renovation phase of the project 8 months after we moved in.

First thing we did? Take down 4 large, mature, dead and dying trees. Conveniently, this is exactly what my company can do.

At 7am on a Saturday morning, one of the ridiculously talented A Plus crews arrived to set-up and handle business. A 60-ton crane backed onto our lawn, the street slowly filled with the A Plus fleet and 10 guys in uniform huddled in for their daily safety meeting and to finalize the plan of attack.

By noon all 4 trees were down. By 3pm the majority of the brush was cleaned up and trucks were pulling away, and by 5pm the stumps were out. It was a beautifully orchestrated production that made me proud. (To give an idea cost, it should have been a $13k job, we paid 2k.)

Here's a quick highlight of that day.



Now that the trees were gone, we could start on the renovation.

To bring it back to wedding planning. There were just SO many decision to make!! What theme? Color scheme? Style? So naturally, I turned to Pinterest.

It's interesting how quickly I narrowed my options after realizing what I didn't like.

It turns out I like the modern, clean look, but not cold or contemporary. Then I pinned a million things and found different options of the what I liked that fit our budget. Shobab happens to like the same thing, which made it even easier as we helped each other pare down options.

We started off with an initial budget of 30k...but I'll get to that later.

Prior to the start of the project, while I was busy trying to be inspired by HGTV, Shobab had followed the progress of a contractor through 5 projects before we started ours. He did his homework on permitting, plumbing options, zoning...you name it. He used many of his "connections" to get the best price on material and appliances. He even figured out that if he took off some work to manage the contractor's guys, he could save us over net $10k just on the contractor's management cost alone. He literally did everything and left the design up to me. If that isn't romantic, I don't know what is.

As usual, I waited until the last second before I had to design the floor plan required for permitting. I jumped online to find a free floor plan app, researched a few "best practices", compared several other floor plans that closely matched my vision, and then quickly put something together.

If I would have known this design was actually going to become the blueprint to the entire project?...I think I would have put an ounce more thought into it. I was just dragging and dropping objects into the app thinking, "hmm, tub goes somewhere in this vicinity, sink over here...eh, I guess toilet looks good here....". (2 weeks later I was staring at a pipe in the middle of the bathroom wondering who in the hell thought that was a good spot for a toilet).

When the permit was approved, Shobab wasted no time. The next morning 5 guys showed up, ready to work.

After 4 months of a mixture of craziness, excitement, stress and exhaustion. We now have a gorgeous, 800 sq ft. luxury studio loft, an additional source of income and I have extreme confidence in Shobab's abilities.

It wasn't an easy project and I didn't anticipate several things. Here are the biggest 4 lessons I learned:

#1. You'll need lots of cash. If you're not contracting a firm, most likely you'll be paying your workers in cash. Think about bleeding cash at a rate of $1000 a day, just for the labor. This changed my perspective of "down" time and the tremendous cost of a project not running smoothly. Even with Shobab forecasting everything 3 days ahead of time to make sure the workers had the exact materials they needed, something so small (like the right size nails) could hold up the work. At times, Shobab was making 3 trips a day to Home Depot.

Just the Home Depot receipts alone.

#2. If you're on a budget, expect to live like you're literally broke. The cash part also means that you can't put it on credit. This was a blessing and also the greatest hardship of the project. Blessing, because it prevented us from going further into debt and it gave us a firm, no room to play around, "budget". Hardship because this also meant that every dime we had went into the project. Even with double incomes from great jobs, not having been in debt prior to the house, we were literally surviving from check to check (without touching our savings). The substantial financial stress we experienced was a new challenge in our relationship we were forced to learn about and work through.

#3. Things will not to go as planned. Either the tiles you took 3 hours to choose are discontinued, or the toilet pipe is a foot from where you want it, we constantly had to adjust the plan. Without Shobab on the job making SO many decisions on the fly, it would have played out so much more inefficiently and much more costly. It made me think that all the seemingly fake issues that come up on HGTV shows really aren't staged.

One of the biggest "oopsie's" we had was with the spiral staircase. We measured the required area that we thought we needed, built up the walls around it, and ordered the stairs. When it came in, we didn't take into account the direction of the opening, and there was just no way it would fit. We lost $400 on the shipping cost alone and argued about the alternatives. In the end, it was Shobab's design that won. And he did an incredible job of executing. 

#4. Try not to be bitchy.  This kind of goes in line with #3 where things won't go as planned. As the one who had very specific ideas in mind with design....there were a few too many times I would come home to find something that was NOT what I had in mind. "Babe, that backsplash is 6" longer than the screenshot I texted you!!". Slowly but surely, I learned to trust Shobab's instincts, allow the process to flow, and then decide if it was really something to fuss over. Because with Shobab, things move so quickly, a wall will already be up, textured and painted between the time I leave for work and when I come home. The process taught us both boundaries in each others work, to know when to back down, to know how to better communicate, and to really appreciate each other's strengths.

Oh, and back to our budget of 30k? It came out to a little more than 2x that. And we still have the landscape to go.

Below is a photo sequence over 4 months. I had no idea a home project could be this efficient. Major props to Shobab, impressive work babe.

Location of Detached Garage from the street

Before Renovation: Marking out extension

Before Renovation: Inside the 245 sq ft garage

Week 1: Tear down wall, build forms for the foundation 

Week 1: Start to open up roof line, prepare footings and install rebar for foundation

Week 1: From the inside - old concrete demo'd, lying pipes for plumbing

Week 2: Hauling the 800 lb, 20ft beam for the roof support

Week 2: Roof line open, beam installed, foundation prepared for concrete, Yaelle for scale.

Week 3: $4000 worth of concrete later (approx 45 CY), foundation is done!

Week 4: Exterior framing goes up

Week 4: From the inside looking out

Week 6: Exterior siding and roof, beginning install for windows, doors and skylights

Week 6: Inside view of skylights (added the middle one as an afterthought).

Week 7: Inside framing for the loft, bathroom and closets go up 

Week 8: Electrical and Insulation complete

Week 9: Sheet rock going in, outlets and lighting installed

Week 9: Exterior installation, preparing for stucco 

Week 10: Stucco and trim pattern to match existing Tudor style

Week 12: Interior almost complete, time for the floors, appliances and finishes

Week 16: Loft 99% Complete! 800 sq ft, (Blue Ridge Oak solid hardwood floors). 

Week 16: My Pinterest perfect kitchen. White subway tiles, Custom cabinets, GE appliances, Carrera marble counter tops 

Week 16: Another Pinterest inspired design: Dark grey tiling, accent white tiles, jacuzzi tub (before glass doors).

Week 16: View of the 240 sq ft upstairs loft space (before cable railing install). 

Week 16: Exterior stucco, painting and wood trim to match original style. Redwood deck in process.
(Thank you Lumber Baron for all the real good wood!!)

Week 18: View of deck, new redwood fence, and the beginnings of the next project.

Week 18: Another view of the backyard and retaining walls for the tiers. 

I'm relieved this part is over. But when owning a home, work seems like it will never be done. The landscape is on the agenda next. A whole new undertaking, and another blog :)