OK, all the votes are in, and the cellar/shop won by a score of 1 to 0 (thanks, Dennis and Amber). That is what we have spent all spring and summer and fall doing. First a little background.


When we moved back here in 1999, we built a garage where the parking pad was and added my Room of Requirement above it (this had been planned since we built the place in 1978). Since then, Gary has been gradually converting half the garage into a pretty good workshop. It has some good tools, a nice dust collection system, and a workbench of sorts. We pulled the car out whenever we needed some assembly space. He has made some pretty neat furniture in it.

There are a lot of drawbacks to sharing the garage, the worst of which are: it's hard to keep the place clean when a muddy/dusty car lives in one side every weekend, and a muddy/snowy tractor on the other side during fall, winter, and spring; it's too cold to work there in winter; and things tend to get stacked up so a major organizing/cleaning effort is required before any project can be started.

What we had originally planned for this summer's project was to take out the old rotten timber cellar and replace it with a slightly larger concrete-walled storage room, then extend the deck to wrap around the end of the house and over the new cellar and the old back porch (that's why we needed to do the bay window/window seat first).

What really happened was (sound familiar?), we postponed the deck extension until a later year and dug the hole deeper and a lot bigger to make a dedicated workshop. Here is the first installment:


It took three weeks to dig the hole and Tom did most of the work. Our little Kubota worked its heart out. First (after we emptied the cellar), Tom moved the rocks (or should I say ROCKS?) that were next to the cellar and removed some of the rock stairway (May 11):

Next two days he worked on digging a space to work. First dig the dirt down with the back hoe, then pick it up with the front loader and haul it away. Note how rotten the timbers are.

May 14, he started demolishing the shed. It was . . . well, just look:

That beam nearly took out a window.

"I won."

That's all for now.  I'll post more soon, probably later today.