Starting the garage!

Let us start with last weekend... since that is when we kicked off the DIY portion of our garage building.

Saturday: The day broke steamy and hot early in the AM, with the mercury predicted to rise right on up to about the century mark. We had someone coming from Craigslist to see my car which was put up for sale earlier in the week. Since I could barely stand to see my car go I choose to spend the morning cleaning up the downstairs and making mass quantities of iced coffee to have on hand.

We're just about to run out the door when we get an SOS call from Pete's older sister. She needs to return a rental tool by noon but needs a truck with a tow hitch to do so. We agree to come over and help, but mention that we have to get to the DMV first in order to register a car before the deadline is up and we have to pay more money.

Load up the trailer and head to the DMV which is about twenty five minutes from us. Twenty minutes later we're done with the DMV and are headed out to the car to go over to Pete's sister, who lives a good forty five minutes from us. Thankfully we're all able to load the tool and get it to the rental agency before it closes. Phew. Crisis adverted.

At that point, its is past noon and we're late for our date at Lowe's.

We're about a half hour from the closest big box stores in any direction. But once we break that magical thirty minute mark there is a plethora of different options. We choose to avoid the stores that tend to be a suburban Saturday afternoon mecca location and picked one that is a little father out and we know to be on the quieter side during prime time.

Best decision ever.

Not only was the store blissfully air conditioned (the norm) but it was also relatively empty of other shoppers for a Saturday. Every single sales associate we dealt with was pleasant and extremely helpful. While we shopped around for the smaller quantity of needed wood, we put our request in for the massive amount of 2x4's.


At the end of our two hour shopping session there were two carts full of wood waiting for us at the contractor check out. Plus, two super strong guys hanging around to help us load it on to the trailer. Both guys sounded relieved when they found out about the trailer, easy loading! We ended up with three contractor cart loads of stuff.

When they started loading the wood onto the trailer, Pete and I were like " Uh, is this going to to even fit?" It was a lot of wood. Like, a lot. Determined as ever to get this done the Lowe's guys loaded the trailer while we worked on filling the backseat of the MDX with windows.

Huge huge huge THANK YOU to these guys. They saved us what was going to be quite literally over an hours worth of work by knocking it out in about 15 minutes. Friendly, no complaints and kept joking around with each other. We were blown away by the high level of customer service. Besides tipping both of them, which we do believe in if you receive excellent service that goes beyond the normal job description/expectation, Pete went in to talk the manager to be sure he knew about the great experience we had at the store that afternoon.



Once the car was loaded it was time for the slow and steady ride home. With the heavy weight load on the car and trailer combined with the excessive heat warning we were really nervous about a blown tire which would be a disaster. When it was possible Pete would pull over and let the tires cool down on the side of the road for a few minutes.

Thankfully we made it home with no problems. Just enough time to grab a quick bite before heading over to the Wee house for some work! It might have been late afternoon but we still had a planned job ahead of us in order to be ready to work with my dad the next morning. The sill plate of the garage had to get down.