FINISHED IN 2020! Sharward's Partial Garage Conversion

I wish I had more progress to share after this three day weekend, but it's something...

Looks pretty good to me, for a long weekend! Not bad at all. - Stuart -

The past several weeks have been intense, not studio related though. I did manage to finish OSB installation on the studio side and sealed all of the gaps so it is now ready for drywall. There's a two ton stack of drywall on the porch and I will be working on that this afternoon with my friend Jason. But here is the other news. We had two retired racing Greyhounds, one 12 years old and then other six. Our elder greyhound got diagnosed with osteosarcoma (bone cancer) and we had to euthanize her a few days later. :cry: Just three weeks later, my wife and I drove over 770 miles (1239 kilometers) to Flagstaff, Arizona, to meet a lady who needed to re-home two beautiful 9 month old Borzoi puppies. We brought them both home with us, kept the female, and gave the male to our friend who also euthanized his greyhound two days before we did ours. Behold, our precious doggos.

Nice to see you back in action Keith and to log into the forum for the 1st time in a few years :) I tried to log in when I when after we messaged while I was at Alameda but the board kept kicking me out. Hopefully, my SAC gig will go thru next year and I will see and get to experience Sharwards's Partial Garage Conversion, in person.

Nothing too exciting to report other than to say I have resumed hanging drywall and am almost done with the three layers of ceiling. Each layer is is smaller than the one above it so that the wall layers will interleave the way they are supposed to. I decided to do all three ceiling layers before doing walls because the drywall hoist is a nuisance and takes up a lot of room and I'd like to get rid of it sooner rather than later. I'll post photos when the ceiling drywall is done later this week. I also ordered two more cases of Green Glue which will arrive tomorrow. I think I will ultimately use 7 cases or 84 tubes of the stuff altogether, well over a thousand dollars' worth.

How come there's no LIKE button on here? :blah: :blah: :blah: BUT I do enjoy the old phpBB boards. It seems like in general new boards, and Social Media does not go into the detail that so many phpBB board users used to go into a decade out.

Facebook invented the "Like" button, and this forum and my build is older than Facebook! The digital camera I used to use back in 2005 was 1.3 megapixels! Anyway, I finished hanging ceiling drywall today and I sold the drywall hoist on craigslist or exactly what I paid for it ($100). I surprised myself by discovering my ceiling will be a couple of inches higher than I recalled. As a result, my first two wall layers of drywall will be taller than the nine foot long boards stacked on my porch. That means more work which bums me out, but I will keep marching forward.

Still plugging away! I gotta get the third layer of drywall on the interior hung (not including tape and mud) before November 13 so I can get my inspection done before my permit expires again. I'm ⅔ done with Layer #2 on walls (ceiling has 3 layers already). I have two weekends between now and then so it's crunch time. I'm slow but cautious...

Guess who passed his drywall fastening inspection today? This guy! One day before my permit was due to expire. Here's a short video if you'd like to see what it looks like with all the three layers of drywall panels installed, plus my commentary on the inspection process that was rather lame. It's so close now! Next step: tape and mud!

Tape and mud is done. Next stop: sanding, followed by texture, followed by paint! It occurred to me today that everything I am now doing is directly tied to aesthetics. That's a pretty awesome feeling. Some of my lighting arrived and I'm really looking forward to hooking those up soon.

Sanding is done, so in anticipation of having texture done this week, I did a little shopping... 8)

The finish line is so close, I can smell it from here. Weird how it smells like paint.

I had a bit of a setback. I was so eager to get paint started that I made an attempt to texture one wall as an experiment to see if I was up to the task. In short, I don't think I am, and attempting to undo it made things much worse. But I think I have a decent plan to bring that wall back to a smooth finish, and I have a couple of contacts including a friend of mine who I think can get the job done at a hopefully reasonable cost. I'm too embarrassed to share a photo of the mess I have made, but hopefully I will have something photogenic in a couple of weeks.

Operation "Fix My Terrible Attempt at Texturing The Walls" is going pretty good. My biggest mistake was not overlooking the parts that needed to be sanded down. I sanded about 7 linear feet to the point that I think it's ready for primer and paint and slopped on about 5 linear feet on another wall. It's much more time consuming than I wish it to be as such an amateur, but it's progress and I'm good with it. A few hours every day or two with many more hours on weekends and I'll be painting in a couple of weeks, maybe by New Year's Day or the week after.

Keep up the good/hard work dude! You inspire so many of us! Greg

Merry Christmas all, I textured the fourth wall last night. One wall is sanded. Ceiling will get textured on or after New Year's Day as I will be out of town for a few days. I'm sure the ceiling will be more challenging and time-consuming due to gravity and ladder, so I'm not looking forward to the work, but I really am looking forward to being done with it and finally ready to prime and paint. I'm pretty satisfied with the texturing. As I have progressed on the job, I have learned some things about the process. I used to worry about the ridges left behind from the trowel and knives, but I learned not to stress about it. Worst case, they can get sanded down, but even easier is shaving them off after they dry with a dry 12" texturing knife, and even better is smoothing it down with the knife after it starts to harden but is still malleable. I have gotten more skilled at creating voids in the texture -- and I think that will be something I notice in the finished product -- each wall I have done looks progressively better, but that means each wall is a little different and inconsistent with the next. That's OK though -- it's part of the story and journey, and the kind of thing hardly anyone will notice and nobody will criticize. I'll shoot and post a video after the ceiling is textured and everything is sanded.

Texture is done and now ready for primer and paint! Here is a video of my textured interior walls.

Painting just about done. I just have a bit of touch-up to do on the ceiling. I was hoping the paint was going to make the texture look better, but it doesn't really, but that's OK. It'll bug me a little as the perfectionist that I am, but there will be so much stuff on the walls and ceiling that I don't think it will get any attention. I do wish I could have gotten a pro to do it, but two contractors I contacted were unresponsive. Laminate flooring has been acclimating for 48 hours, so I plan on installing that tomorrow. My original plan was to do polished concrete, but again, two contractors that specialize in that didn't return my calls. Most of the floor will be covered with rugs anyway, so I went with a product I knew would look pretty good and that I knew I could install without much trouble. Cleaning up the switches and outlets and putting covers on them will take a while since there are so many of them. Tomorrow will be busy.

It looks awesome! And that flooring is going to be gorgeous! Greg

Thanks, Greg. Didn't start on flooring today, but I did finish painting (but for some thimbleful of paint touch-up here and there at the end) and I got the wall sconces installed, plus got covers on front and rear switches, and it's looking great.

I didn't start installing flooring this weekend as I had hoped, but I got a pesky chore out of the way -- installing the door thresholds. They are aluminum with ridges underneath them so that they don't bend when you stand on them -- but they are hollow, and I was concerned about the thresholds being a weak point in my isolation. I needed flexible mass to mold into them. What can I mold into shape like clay?.Ah, that's it! Modeling clay! It was challenging drilling the holes in the concrete to accommodate the screws. I chewed through several concrete and masonry drill bits. Plastic screw anchors went into the holes. Flooring goes down this week!!

I seem to have lost my concrete slab. Once the transition pieces, baseboards, and door casings are in place, it's time to beef up those doors and then paint them. I can also get my final inspection done soon. Normally one need not have floors done before a final inspection, but I need to because of that gap.

A side benefit of having a separated room with great noise isolation, even if not completely done, is that it affords me the opportunity to be a link in a chain of animal rescue. "Riley" had a private plane ride from Murietta (about 40 miles south of Riverside) to Sacramento with a short stop in La Verne (near Pomona) where the pilots picked up a cleft pallette puppy as a fellow passenger. I picked up Riley at Sacramento McClellan Airport (former Air Force Base air field, now civilian) and brought him home with us and in five days he will ride transport up to Southern Oregon where Oldies But Goodies already has a forever home lined up for him. Sweet boy.

Baseboards and door casings are in place! Looking great I think. Video Update, February 16, 2020 Today I am beefing up the doors.