Our Garage Remodel

A few months ago I explained here that we were in the middle of a garage remodel and that I would share how we were able to do it with the little money we had. I honestly thought I’d be sharing much sooner than this!

First, a garage remodel is not easy, parts of it are not fun, it can quickly become not cheap, and it takes a lot of time if you are doing it yourself instead of paying someone to do it. This garage remodel was mostly completed by me and my father-in-law with extra help from my husband, my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and nephew. We definitely could not have done it ourselves but we did and there were only a few tears (I worked very hard at physical labor with in-laws living in my home for several months, a few tears were bound to happen).

We were able to even start this process because we recieved the first time homebuyer credit. Unfortunately for us, we received the credit that has to be paid back, yet it gave us the jump we needed to actually start on it. Before you start check with your county and city for permits and such.

We made the garage remodel as cheap as we could, though with effort, we could have made it even cheaper. Our garage remodel consisted of doubling the size (the new part basically being a nicer looking lean-to), a new roof, and new siding.

Here is how we made our garage remodel cheaper:

We did it ourselves. Not paying a company to complete the garage remodel probably saved us thousands of dollars alone.

Use what you already have. We had many boards sitting around looking for a use as well as a deck that we had taken off the old house. We were able to recycle the old lumber into the new garage. My favorite part of the entire garage was the use of the two old windows that had been in our barn since we bought our land. Those two windows really completed the addition and helped the appearance of the garage as you come up the driveway.

Shop around when completing a garage remodel. We went to several different stores, including the Habitat for Humanity Restore in our area. We planned well and window shopped first. While most items were cheaper at one store there were a few that were cheaper at the other making it worth are while to drive back and forth (luckily the stores were less than a mile apart).

Use rebates where you can. The shingles we used were not only on sale but we also found a $50 rebate coupon at the customer service desk.

Use cash and when you can’t use no interest credit cards. While we did have a couple thousand from our housing credit (we didn’t pay that much for the house itself to get a very big credit!), we also put about three thousand of our savings and cash in. It didn’t take us long to realize we hadn’t planned as well as we thought and were a few thousand short (so tip #346 is to plan better than we did!). Our only option was to use one of our store credit cards to finish the garage remodel. We chose the one with no interest and no payments for six months.

With our savings, cash, the no interest credit card and the housing credit we essentially will have paid cash for an extensive garage remodel.

It wasn’t easy and if necessary we could have spread the building process even farther and paid cold hard cash as we went but emotionally and phsically I was done!

This garage remodel could have been done even cheaper. For instance, we could have only used materials that we got for free, from job sites or places like craigslist or freecycle. What else would you have done to have a more frugal garage remodel?