New Room

One of the things we knew we wanted to do when we bought this house 2.5 years ago is to enclose the garage into living space. It had a one car garage, total space was 20'x20' but the parking area was smaller than that. I appreciate garages as much as anyone but it seems like every house we have had one, we hardly ever use it (mostly because they have been small garages) When we decided to buy this house we knew we wanted to expand the house and we knew we wanted a bigger living room.
When I was in high school, the house I spent most of my time hanging out had a game room that had been converted from a garage. It was the perfect hang out room because it was somewhat separate from the rest of the house and you could have separate hang out areas.  And you could shut the doors for privacy and not disturb the people in the rest of house by being loud.  So, it has always been in my head as a possibility when looking at houses to buy.
Our house had a garage perfect for converting. So in the fall, I started working on a garage conversion. It took a while and was a whole lot of work. The conversion included taking down the garage door and building a wall in it's place. Adding an additional interior door, adding two new windows, doing all new wiring, new insulation, new sheet rock and paint, new carpet, new duct work for heat and air. We also bought new furniture and I built some new furniture.
The main purpose we wanted this room to serve is a media room to watch movies.  I love watching movies and I wanted a room that was set up for doing this. I ran speaker wire for 5.1 sound and structured the new room around this purpose. I put in recessed lights with dimmers which is really nice. I also put in solid core interior doors and insulated the interior walls so you could close off the room and really keep the majority of the sound in that room.  We were able to put a wood stove in the new room to help with heating and because we like having a wood stove. We also wanted a place for a piano for Margo and for the girls in the future. So we now have the new room and we still have our old smaller living room which is now more of a sitting room area.
 I can not tell you how awesome it is to have this room. I have never been so happy and excited about something house related. It is so nice to have a two areas to hang out when friends are over. We can put a movie on for the kids in the room and the adults can hang out in the other living area and play games or talk without getting disturbed. And Margo and I can put on a movie after the girls go to bed, shut the doors, and crank it up, and not disturb them. It is going to be great to have as the girls get older and have friends over. It makes me very very happy.

Outside view before remodel

During remodel.  I had to add concrete where there was a tray in the floor for the garage door.

After: I put in two windows. Unfortunately they don't sell 1980's baby blue siding anymore so I had to buy white siding and get paint color matched to the old siding and paint it. i think it turned out pretty good.

Inside the house before adding new interior door.

New interior door.  We now have two doors from the new room into the house. The original goes into the laundry room and this new one goes into the main part of the house.

Before

After

Before

After:  I used hardie plank exterior siding and painted it for behind the wood stove.

Margo let me buy a big new 4K TV. I built a new TV console for all our media. One of the main things I wanted it to do besides hold the TV is to hold our records and record player so they were easy to play.