Another Upstairs Sprucing Project

 

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, we are doing some other projects in between working on the basement to get the house spruced up for our appraisal. One of the things we have been working on is the little roof that runs between the carport and the garage. We love having it there to shield us from rain when going out to the garage, but it (and the carport ceiling) were covered in this white corrugated plastic stuff that I've never been overly fond of. One day, I got this wild idea to take it down and see what was underneath.

The answer: a lot of nasty stuff. And birds nests. Lots of birds nests. We knew there was at least one, so we made sure to wait until the babies were gone before starting on this project, so no baby birds were harmed in the making of this post.

Once we got all the plastic sheets unscrewed and removed, this is what we were left with. A corrugated metal roof with a wood grid and several extra pieces of wood that the plastic sheets were screwed into.

Next we tackled this weird wood wall thing. We basically used a hammer to break up and pry it all off.

Once that bit was gone, we removed all the wood supports that the plastic stuff was screwed into.

Then we were left with a bit of a blank slate. We tossed around a couple ideas of what we wanted to do from here, ranging from tearing the whole thing out and re-doing it, just replacing the roof part, or just working with what was there.

We settled on painting what we had. I decided to spray paint the corrugated metal a sky blue color and then paint the wood grid white.

It took 6 cans of spray paint and about an hour of time to spray the metal roof. I thought I was going to have permanent claw hand afterwards. My hands were so weak I could barely press down the trigger on the can. But I persevered.

About half way through my first wood painting session, I decided that I was going to leave it at one coat. The decision was 10% because I liked the look of only one coat and 90% because it was an annoying task and I didn't want to have to do another coat.

Here we are all finished up. Still not the fanciest thing out there, and maybe down the line we will tear it all out and put up something different. But for now, I'm pretty pleased with our charming little roof.