Our house was built in the 50s and we’ve renovated inside, but now it’s time to tackle the backyard...
We’ve decided that the double car garage, which has a leaky roof and some significant cracks in the concrete floor and daylight between some of the bricks in the walls, is beyond saving. We don’t use it to house the cars as the driveway is a little too narrow to get cars up and down every day.
It’s primarily been used by the kids for table tennis and pool, as well as a place to store bikes, tools and a whole lot of junk.
We’ve decided to install a pool and build a new games room/teenage retreat with a similar footprint to the old garage.
We wanted a flexible space that will primarily be used for entertaining but could be an additional bedroom or granny flat if we needed it to be. We need part of it to be storage and it also seemed wise to include a toilet and bathroom, particularly as we only have one inside.
The first step has been to sell what we can on eBay and throw out anything we haven’t used for a while.
The second step was realising that we’d get a much better result using a friend who is an architect, which has been an interesting process.
Here’s the first design we came up with, which we’ve now had to change to reduce costs… Sadly, we've had to delete the special bricks which had a circular hole - we were going to install glass behind them but the cost was too high.
I’ll give updates as we progress with the build.
Jason
