Whilst I was at Le Mans (blog to follow seen) the builders made good progress, with three sides now at full height. Due to the slight slope of the garden the garage looks higher than I was expecting, but my plans were based on the garden being flat.
We are still on schedule for the roof to be fitted this week, at which point it will start to feel more like a garage.
It has been a busy day on the 119 project!
The builders have built 2 more corners and made good progress on the left wall, and the hardcore for under the floor has been delivered (the blue damp proof membrane shows what will be the eventual floor height). They had an extra guy working with them today, so progress was good.
The electricians were also on site, until 18:30 when I got home, I’d bumped into them at my office at 10:00 and they said this was their next job – they were still here when I got home at 18:30, which was good going. They were installing trunking for the electric cable and network cable, as they had some water pipe in the van already, they ran that just in case. They had to drill through from the outside loo and the bricks were putting up a good fight, when I got home there was a big pile of empty drill batteries, showing that the outside loo is literally built like a brick shithouse!
The builders have made good progress, all the walls have been complete to floor level with engineering bricks and they have started building up the main walls. The floor is due to be laid early next week.
After day three was rained off, the builders were able to get some bricks laid. With 2 walls and the start of the third and fourth I can see exactly how big the garage is going to be – and it looks like there will be plenty of room to work in there!
We have foundations! When I got home this evening there was a large pile of bricks on the street outside, I was also surprised to see the guys still working, it turned out the concrete had arrived late, so they were here until gone 18:30 getting the foundations finished.
Assuming the rain holds off they are going to start laying bricks tomorrow!
From the 30th May to the 1st June 2014, Coventry city centre was taken over by cars and motorbikes for the first Coventry Motofest. Coventry is the spiritual home of the British motor industry, with an automotive design pedigree and engineering history to rival any other city in the world and I am proud to live here. It is the unique motoring heritage that is celebrated through MotoFest – a free motoring extravaganza which for one weekend each year, turning Coventry city centre into the UK’s most exciting display of great cars from the past, present and future.
The focal point of the event was the display of classic cars on Broadgate, the cars on display ranged from the more common classics; Minis, Triumphs and E-Types through to 1930’s Bentleys and Bugattis. Alongside the classic cars there, were motorbikes from Triumph and Francis Barnett as well as the new Lightning GT – an electric supercar being built here in Coventry. The degree show for the Coventry University Automotive and Transport Design course was part of Motofest and was a good opportunity to see the work of the car designers of the future.
In addition to the static displays an oval racing circuit had been set up in the Cox Street car park, under the ring road for stunt displays and stock car demonstrations. The stock cars sounded incredible, with the V8 noise ricocheting from all the concrete supporting the ring road and it was only when I got back home that I realised my face was covered in black dust from all the tyre smoke.
Sunday saw even more cars on display on Broadgate, but also the anti clockwise lanes of the ring road turned into a racetrack for cars to do demonstration runs (hopefully there will be some timed competition next year), cars running on the ring road ranged from historic competition cars, such as Mini, Talbot Sunbeam and Skoda rally cars, to Time Attack cars and performance road cars from Jaguar, all lead around by the “Dreadnought” pace car.
My photos from the weekend are in the Coventry Motofest 2014 gallery:
After a slowish start this morning, waiting for the skip and digger to be delivered the guys have made good progress. When I left for the office at lunch time, most of the concrete slab was still intact.
The plan for the next few days is that the bricks are going to be delivered tomorrow (Tuesday) and the electrician will be fitting the armoured cable and ducting on Wednesday.
The preparation for the garage build is complete, over the last few weeks since my last post, we have been busy – two skips have been filled with the garage and its contents, one run to the tip, cleared the route for a trench (for the electrics), built a raised bed and filled it with topsoil from the old vegetable plot (which will become a path when the new garage is built). The biggest job was building the raised bed, although I did get some help from Jen:
We used a custom kit from Woodblocx, which consists of pre cut and drilled treated sleepers and plastic pegs to hold them together. I was really impressed with them, although it wasn’t quite as easy as building with Lego, as I had been expecting – the pegs took a fair amount of hammering to fit, then the next layer of wood also needed a lot of hammering to fit into the pegs, but the end result is solid. We filled the bed with ten wheelbarrows of soil from the old vegetable plot at the top of the garden, which we sieved before adding to the bed. We replanted the strawberries, rosemary and thyme, which were in the old bed and added oregano, three different varieties of chilli plant and leeks, which I’ve grown from seed.
The builders and electrician are arriving at 08:30 tomorrow to start work, of course I’ll regularly update the blog with progress.
The old garage has gone! Yesterday, along with a few friends I dismantled the old wooden garage to make space for the new garage. I think it actually took longer to clear out the garage than it did to demolish it! There’s now just a lodge pile of wood at the bottom of the garden, so the next job is to get a skip (now that there’s space for one!) to get rid of wood etc.
In a bit of a change from my normal subjects of cars and travel, I’m going be posting about my garage build project. As some of you may know Jen and I have been renovating our house – aka the 119 Project for a few years, but now we have got to the really interesting bit, for me anyway – the garage build! There will be plenty of photographs going up on my 119 Project Flickr album, but I’m also going to add some word on here for the garage build part.
The plan is to replace the old wooden garage, which isn’t wide enough for a modern car, with a large single brick build garage, where I can relax and work on my MR2/whatever car I have. This will not be a garage just for storing junk, we will have a shed for that!
The old garage is being demolished tomorrow, so watch this space for updates!