We are building a second floor living area over our garage as a place for my disabled father to live.

We would demo the 23'x23' garage, but I am pretty fond of it:



We also found out that despite no power lines above our garage, there is a aerial easement over the back side of the garage.

Plans are to come forward 5 feet to satisfy the stupid easement, but build a 30x30 structure, raising the ceiling of the existing garage to 10 feet from 8 feet to enable me to fit a lift. Then a 30' by 8' upstairs deck/patio.


Inside, mostly open except for that back room which will have W/D, bathroom/closet.



Permits applied for in August, then Harvey happens. Approved in late December, then waited on HOA.

They engineered a way to reinforce the current slab. City inspectors and the engineers have come out and approved it.


Then new driveway/slab poured today.



The big box you see just left of center is the foundation for the electric dumbwaiter. Stairs will wrap around it.

And let my 5yo and 3yo go to town.



Those are Rainbows on the right.

mikefromdilley said:

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Is it too late to widen some of those doors to the bathroom area? If he is in, or ever needs to be in a wheelchair, he might really benefit from wider access. Very cool of you to do this.

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Good idea, I'm sure that is an easy change. The shower will have a bench, two shower heads and one will be a handheld one.

If he's in a wheelchair, have you considered the difficulty in making it up those stairs or are you using that as a way to corral him up there?

Maybe a little lift off the side of the deck would work.

AggieFanatic09 said:

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If he's in a wheelchair, have you considered the difficulty in making it up those stairs or are you using that as a way to corral him up there?

Maybe a little lift off the side of the deck would work.

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He isn't in a wheel chair and is really light since he hasn't had solid food in almost 20 years. He gets up and down the stairs fine, but will likely not leave it one he has a tough time with stairs

The Fife said:

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Have you considered adding a tankless water heater to complete the package?

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Took the words right outta my mouth Fife!

Guitarsoup, you obviously haven't been on the HI board much...otherwise you would have realized what Fife was getting at with that comment...

Looking forward to following the progress on this.

Concrete is curing today, so I started the demo of the deck while workers are gone. We have a 600sf deck and a hot tub that we are removing.

Lazy man post digger? Racing jack.

I second the wider door thought and make all of them pocket doors to eliminate the lost swing space. Sink or vanity at ADA, wheelchair height, all light switches wheelchair height accessible too.

I stumbled across using a farm jack to lift out fence posts. Drill a couple of holes in the post and bolt a block to the side of the post. Jack the whole post and concrete ball right out of the ground. Saved me a ton of effort on removing a fence last fall. Only problem I ran into was sometimes it just cracked the post out of the ball leaving me with a concrete block underground which could have been an issue if I was replacing the fence and needed to put a new post in that position.

When I hit this issue, I just take the flat end of a rockbar diagnally out each corner of the old post hole square, and the concrete comes up in 2 or 3 pieces. It's fairly simple and takes about 6 hits per post usually.

Who did the design and who's doing the construction? Ballpark on budget?

We're thinking about something similar for my grandmother.

AgLA06 said:

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Who did the design and who's doing the construction?

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I'm going to leave that out for now. The guy who I hired is an Ag.

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Ballpark on budget?

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Expensive as **** and gets more expensive every day.

Sorry if I got too personal. I remember a RTT thread where he did his above garage apartment and it seemed to be about $130K, but there wasn't a lot of options for contractors or designers.

Time between pics: about a half hour.

Of course it only took half an hour, its demo!

That's the fun part!

Edit to Add: Looks like you're going to have quite a bit of dirt work to do in front of the garage to get a driveway in, yes?

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Looks like you're going to have quite a bit of dirt work to do in front of the garage to get a driveway in, yes?

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Driveway is already poured. We have to have two steel beams and we had to dig up and repour a better foundation for those beams/columns.

Steel beams are here.

Beam+two columns supporting = 2700lbs.

I was going to mention using steel because I did a project like this for an architect years ago. The garage began to rack a while later because of the added weight. I had second guessed it during construction but the architect was sure of his design.

You shouldn't have that problem.

The steel is going to be in the front of the garage on the overhang. Very front of the porch and the front edge of the structure. So where the dumb waiter is and eight feet in front of that. Next week the siding comes off and we will reinforce the existing studs.

Very jealous, I wish we could use steel beams with our project!

Like your toothbrush built-ins around the rim!
Wow, growing fam.

Both beams installed and now the framers are getting busy.



Looks like I have some tree trimming to do.



The back wall of the second story is five feet in front of the the back wall of the first story because Centerpoint has an aerial easement over the back few feet of my property, even though there is not a freaking power line.

But, the good thing is that gives us more covered parking.

I was gone most of the day getting various things fixed on my wife's car, but they got a lot of progress done despite not having me there for guidance.

Entire main structure is framed. You can see the openings for the dual french doors on the front.




From the front door looking towards the bathroom corner, you can see why we decided to do an addition rather than move. Greenbelt behind us, no neighbors. There is a jogging track there. But no one will ever be behind us or on one side of us.



My house on the left, only neighbor we have on the right. Very sweet cat lady and her husband live there. Two or three dozen cats? No one knows. Could be more. But she is always home and is very nice. The windows on the left with the solar screens are my home office. I'm waving to you right now. HI!

You should see those guys move around on that scaffolding. Like they are walking on the ground and they built it in no time at all.