Watch our garage construction start + Plans for the ROOF DECK!

This video has been in progress for basically two years now, and so weird to see construction actually starting on it! An enormous thanks to my friend Danny (@CauseyDesign on IG) helping us make our initial drawings, aka playing The Sims with garage plans.

And then also thanks to Bill and Bruce from Cooler Design here in Indianapolis for the final prints!

Finally- Adam and his crew at Arrow Earth are the absolute best. So thankful for Adam’s advice and wisdom over the past few months as he’s helped us continue to clean up the school, build us a driveway, and now start on the garage. https://www.arrowearthservicesllc.com/

Next up: working on a big video FINALLY showing how we’ve “sealed” up all the exposed brick walls inside the school, sharing the colors we’ll be using on the walls with recycled paint from Up Paint, and tonssss more cleaning.

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@schoolhousehomestead

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Want to work with us?
schoolhomestead@gmail.com

So I’m standing here in what will become our garage in the last week we actually poured all of the Footers for the foundation and Adam and Blake and all the crew from Arrow and Earth they did an incredible job just kicking off this project and there was one very very

Delighted toddler who got to watch some of the progress what do you see right here Arlo Hol holes yeah what do you see over here a what Yeah [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] So one of the awkward things about turning an old school into a house is the fact that there aren’t normal house things like garages attached to school buildings and after a year of parking our 14-year-old Toyota Camry outside getting covered in bird poop I’ve realized what a luxury a garage really

Is so while Sean and I have been inside doing stuff like shop vacing and cleaning and sealing up the brick to make it less Dusty with a masonry safe sealer big stuff has been going on outside when we bought this school 2 and a half years ago there was a metal pole

Barn type garage here already but with all the masonry and repointing we were going to have to do to the school and the state of some of the walls we decided hey if we’re going to do all of this work why don’t we work on the

Building and get it exactly how we want it in the long term so here are a few shots of what the back of the school looked like when we bought it as you can see we needed to repair a lot of things on this side of the building there were

Some spots in the brick where you could see through the mortar into the building other spots had big plants growing in the walls there was water damage and stuff was just getting into the building all over the place and it’s it’s 100 years old and finding a good Mason is

Super difficult it was one of the more stressful things about buying this crazy old building and the only reason we were able to figure out how to repoint all this and solve these problems was because we found our amazing Mason Brad Brad and his partner e repointed the

Entire exterior of the building and then they also cut out the windows and doors that we wanted to make our plans work seriously if you’re looking for a restoration Mason in Central Indiana please DM and I’ll direct you to Brad he is the man in phase one of the

Construction we added two patio doors off the back of the school here with one of the patio doors going out to a roof deck on the garage this roof deck was one of the things that we’ve always always wanted to figure out how to make for whatever house we ended up buying we

Just happened to end up buying a school when we lived in New York our last apartment was truly it was nothing special on the inside but it did have this amazing Terrace right off the kitchen where I’d grow a cocktail garden and had tons of plants and we’d eat

Outside with friends whenever possible and I just loved the access directly from the kitchen where you spend a ton of time right outside so when we bought the school recreating this Terrace was something we really wanted to figure out if it was possible because that little

Terrace in Harlem was so special to us and we plan to have some big old dinner parties for family and friends so back to the garage for the first round of plans we worked with my friend Danny who helped us make a lot of the Rend rings

Of the school from the kitchen to the exterior um Danny helped do a ton of the facade updates in our hometown um he also opened the Salvage shop in town which is an incredible place because all the proceeds go back to revitalizing Franklin but Danny is ridiculously

Creative and he helped us make these initial renderings for planning our garage we wanted to have the three Bays for cars we’re not really car people but uh we wanted to have two for cars and and one for like a mudroom dog washing slop syn bootroom type of Entry maybe

We’ll park a golf cart there someday kind of have like a a uh moving workbench when we’re working out in the yard um but just a place to contain the messy sprawl of life with animals and kids so on the top here we mocked up a Pergola and we’re playing with an

Outdoor kitchen but you know we’ve since nixed that I since our actual kitchen is right inside here and we originally played with having this spiral staircase right here but we killed that idea in part because uh spiral staircases look cool and like a little like a little piece of architectural art but they’re

Pretty annoying to actually use but it was fun to to put it in the St uh we also mocked up a bunch of Windows on the garage but uh we’re not going to do that because we have since learned that windows are stup stupidly expensive and we’d rather not look into our garage

Anyway we’d rather have a bunch of plants out here so over here is our little patio Zone and we’ll also have a little garden shed um with our these are sliding doors in what we ended up going with on top of this little garden shed

Deck um our garden will be over here out in the yard uh so I thought that that would just be handy to have a little bit of storage right there um but honestly like I know there’s a lot of doors here um I mean for the size of the building

There’s actually only 1 2 3 four five six doors total um but we wanted to be able to easily let dogs out and you know kind of have just like separate entries and places where you can come and go and get outside quickly um so yeah that’s

Where we did stuff stuff with Danny um you can also see through here um this little door has a transom window so it’s a little awkward so we had this like glass awning but I’ll get into what we changed and updated for for that but it was really really helpful having Dany

Mock this stuff up so that we could kind of just like see what our ridiculous ideas look like uh before we get into paying a real architect so Danny’s not a real uh architect he did go to architecture school but he is not uh someone who can really make architecture

Drawings so for these drawings we worked with cooler design out of Indie and a big thanks to Bill and Bruce for all of their work on these and not a ton has changed from what we initially mocked up with Dany um we did make sure that the

Patio door walks directly out onto the roof deck um so that we don’t have to have like Steps up and it would like block part of the view into the backyard from the kitchen which was kind of one of the main points of making this this sliding window door view from

Here so we had to change how this is laid out on the back because we have to we had we’ll have to like grade away and take dirt out of here lower the garage a bit so we have to have a little bit of steps up here um we also didn’t we don’t

Have a perola or anything initially one we need to live in the space and you know figure out how we actually want to use something before we do a bunch of things like that but we did mock it up so or we did have uh cooler design make

The foundation something that like you know it will be able if we ever want to do a three Season room or we just want to do a perola like it the the foundation will support whatever we want to do in in the future um and the other

Thing that glass awning that Dany had before we changed that a little bit to be a little bit safer so that kids aren’t just like sliding down and um breaking it or yeah it was just a little bit complicated to figure out how to make something like that so instead what

We have is we have a little bit of a window here that goes into where you can see the transom from the door back here um but we also have the the raised area for the steps inside here um above this will just be a little planter to have

Kind of a little cold frame or some herbs in the winter time and in the summertime right off of the roof deck which is obviously handy for cooking so uh this animation um actually goes inside the garage so you’ll come in drive in the garage and then you’ll be

Able to go um right onto the steps um up into the schoolhouse um and so because we had to lower the grade of the garage this this area actually walks directly into the basement um so we were trying to figure out how to have um an easier entrance without steps um into the

School um you know whether it’s for us with a ton of groceries or when we get older or when we have parents who are older um just having like an easier way to enter the school where you don’t have to go up any steps

Um yeah so we will end up having a door somewhere on on this wall um but this animation actually goes up into the school which is really cool and it goes out onto the deck this way so we’ll be able to look out on our backyard and a bit away from the Indiana

Mosquitoes and have lots of dinner parties up here so now the real building starts we’re working with Jerry and Rob at Harmon construction to manage the project and they’ve actually been the ones who have worked with Colin and George on the inside for framing the schoolhouse and doing all the stuff to

Like make the floor plan actually work and path inspection and do all that cool stuff super thankful to have Harmon helping us make the garage a reality Adam and Blake and the whole clue Arrow Earth are just the best and also appreciate all their advice for all the

Excavation and careful work that they’ve done over the past few months from clean up of the original driveway to installing our new driveway and now building the garage and like I mentioned before in the meantime while the garage is getting built we’ve been working on sealing up the brick on the inside I’ve

Got a whole video about that and all of the different products that I tested to quote seal the brick um that allows it to still breathe and still have a lot of longevity while also like enhancing the the natural color and beauty of these huge bricks on the inside uh exposed

Walls of the school I’ve also been working on finalizing all the colors for the inside of the school and it’s super daunting to choose an entire house full of colors at once um but it’s also really exciting because we are going to be working with the folks

At up paint because they make recycled paint recycled paint for a recycled school and really excited about all of that progress as well thanks as always for following along as we turn this old school into a house as we figure out how to turn this old school into a house

More updates to come as soon as I can get to them and yeah thanks again