Here for my yearly check-in. If you don’t know me, that’s understandable, it’s been a minute. I’m Emily Bowser. I am a freelance stylist and worked for EHD for a few years pre-pandemic. I occasionally come on here and share the woes and wins of buying and owning a house in Los Angeles where I live with my husband (fellow creative and freelancer) and our 3 adorable children.
They are cats.
Last we talked was May 2023 where I “concluded the saga” of my front yard reno that started in April 2021. I am nothing if not proof that overnight renovations are *maybe* for the rich and for home-related TV shows that lie to us about everything (a topic for another day perhaps). We put a nice little bow on that renovation with a beautiful urban garden by Down to Farm. Update: the summer crop was great, maybe a bit out of control tbh:
Today we are going to be talking about renovating my garage.
Quick download/history of the space: We live on a two-on-a-lot and have renters in a back house. Our small house sits above two, one-car garages. The garages are separated by a wall that holds up more than half of our home. Let’s just say, permits in 1930 aren’t what they are now. Each side of the garage is about 7’(ish) wide and 28’ deep. The left side (if you are looking at the house) was “ours”, the right had previously been used by tenants of our back house. We didn’t want our tenants to have to deal with constant flooding, so we took the left side which is lower and more likely to flood. Why didn’t we just fix the flooding? Well, it’s not for lack of trying, but rather, a lack of money. Alas, if you want to put my name in the search bar of this blog, you’ll find quite a few posts that will paint that picture for you.
In my line of work, I need a good amount of space to hoard. Word to the wise, don’t become a stylist (you could put a period right there) if you don’t have excess space (or if you could be happy doing literally anything else). The problem is, we only have 2 closets in our whole house, a small hall closet and a medium clothes closet in our bedroom, and zero attic space. The garage had to be a space for my hoard, Andrew’s hoard, tools, keepsakes, and house overflow (think paper towels, toilet paper, cat litter, etc). We did the best with what we had, it was organized chaos. Because of the frequent flooding, everything had to be in waterproof bins and/or off the floor. Every time I had a job it was like a game of Jenga. It was tough, there wasn’t enough space to move around or pack things up and often my driveway looked like this:
In 2021 I started a project that took me over a year to finish: I photographed every single decor item I owned and made a spreadsheet so that I wouldn’t have to tear my garage apart (as much) every time I had to pack up for a job.
Rewinding a bit – In late 2020 new tenants were moving in and announced they had no need for the garage *cue the heavenly sound effect*. I immediately started planning Andrew’s eviction. Just a reminder, because it’s never not funny that we lived like this, THIS was his office in peak COVID times:
The old tenants moved out and in Sept of 2020, Ron, our slippery contractor did $5,000 of “waterproofing” on the back of the garage (spoiler alert: it did NOT in fact proof any water). We painted the space, threw down a jute rug, put a piece of plywood on a set of Ikea drawers, bought a space heater, and said “good enough” for THREE YEARS.
In April of 2021, we began the construction on the front yard, there’s like a 34 part series about it on the blog. In one of those, I talked about how, in trying to help the unending issue of my garage flooding, we put in a french drain in front of the garage and also extended our “landing space” at the top of the steps into a full-on patio. One problem we were having was water dripping down the house, directly into the top of the garage door on the left, the patio created an overhang to help keep water out. Extending our patio inadvertently added about 50 square feet to the garage and when your whole house is only 860 square feet, every foot counts.
To recap: Andrew moved into the garage in Sept 2020 and it was a huge improvement for him…and our relationship 🙂 We catnapped Gremmy off the street in Jan of 2021 and there he lived for NINE months. Turns out he was feral and needed a lot of rehabbing. We began the front yard makeover in April of 2021. Andrew wrote a movie, launched a Kickstarter for said movie, and did all the preproduction in that garage. Don’t worry, when he left to location scout in Sep 2021 I made him rehome Gremmy upstairs. When he came home from shooting, he returned to the garage to edit his movie and got into Sundance 2023. Cat tax:
The garage luckily stayed pretty cool, until 95 degrees or so, then it became a hot box, but he was able to make it work with fans when it was hot and space warmers when it was cold, outside of a few weeks of the year where he would come work out of the dining room. Despite the efforts to fix the flooding, we only curtailed it slightly. We had many, many more floodings, too many to keep count of but it *mostly* stayed on “my” side of the garage however, there were a few times that it was so bad that it overflowed into the other side. Many days were spent wet-vac-ing, dehumidifying, and fanning out the space. We tried to keep Ron accountable but the slippery man ghosted me for real this time. It seems as though the only way I was able to keep him around fixing things for years is because we owed him money, but as soon as he had our money (about $260,000 from 2016-2021) he was gone. Le sigh, we learned a lot about a contractor relationship, that’s for sure. All that to say, we knew the water was more than a nuisance, that it probably was getting to the point where it may be a safety hazard for Andrew to continue working down there, not to mention the framing of the garage held up the living room, guest bedroom, hall, and bathroom upstairs.
After the front yard saga, long after Ron was gone, I started slowly working with a contractor named Javier, who I’ve loved working with. He did smaller projects in late 2022 for us, like the hot tub area and our mini-kitchen makeover. It was nice to be able to build trust with smaller projects before jumping into something that was a lot more expensive. At the end of 2022, I asked Javier to give me an estimate for what needed to be done in the garage. I guess one fortunate thing about the fact that we forget what rain even is for 9 months of the year is that I knew I would have until October of 2023, almost a full year later, to save up before the rain started again. I wanted to know what it would cost to raise the floor up (it was lower than the driveway, making any water that entered, pool inside of the space), truly waterproof the ENTIRE garage (which included a French drain behind the garage, under the house), put in a few more overhead lights, temperature control the space and add a toilet and a sink. His estimate came back at $25,000 and so we started scraping and saving. As these things go, the budget ballooned. We added a couple of small things, among them were adding storage under the house in the crawl space along with some shelves under the stairs and putting a concrete slab on the side of the house so that we could put in a 10’x4’ shed. Unfortunately, the biggest budget buster was one of those fun ones that happen only as you are ripping walls down and it’s too late to turn back. The prior water damage and termite infestation (we got a new roof and tented for termites when we bought the house) were on full display when the walls were removed and the framing for most of the house was exposed. If you touched the 28’ beam that divided the two spaces and held most of our house up, it LITERALLY turned to dust. I’ll spare you the nervous breakdown. $45,000 later, we had our new garage. Of course, it clearly was very important that we did this work, it is technically very good money spent but, you know, it’s $20,000 more than we were expecting. I am older and wiser now, but I just want to say this for renters in case it’s unclear to anyone: don’t buy a house unless you have a niceeeee cushion financially or you will be stressed out every month for…ever? “Throwing your money away” because of renting vs buying is not the only factor to consider. For example, there isn’t really a price one can put on the certainty of knowing “this is exactly what I am going to owe every month for this agreed-upon amount of time”. Budgeting monthly as a renter is 10000% easier IMHO. I know about the uncertainties that can exist when renting, we did it for a long time, I’m just saying there are uncertainties when you own as well, like the thing that your entire financial future is hinged on (my situation) may literally crumble to the ground unless you throw $20,000 at it, immediately. I enjoy owning a house and despite everything, I’m still glad I did it (I’ll admit as soon as I typed that I was like – “am I??”) and I would still, if I sold the house right now, make money. I just think there’s something to be said about having your money in your pocket vs tied up and I am here for you, renters, to reflect on, “Do I want that?”
Here’s some fun transformations of the space as a palette cleanser:
We were out of town, had COVID for the first time, and then out of town again for most of the construction so my process photos are few, but let me try to explain a couple of things. On the right side wall, on the right side of the garage, there are doors that access under the house, you can’t see well in the straight on but you can see a little better here:
That is our crawl space where we now keep keepsakes, holiday stuff, etc. The stuff you don’t need often. It’s also, for safety reasons (stays very temperate), where we keep extra paint. There’s another door partially open on the far end of the wall in the photo above, that’s the storage under the stairs where Andrew keeps a good amount of gear. Both are important to be able to access and had to be considered when deciding where to put furniture.
As mentioned, we live in a one-bathroom home, which most of the time is ok. It’s funny to me to think that the experience of most people in the US is having multiple bathrooms with multiple sinks and vanities etc. We have 2 sinks in our house: our teeny tiny bathroom sink (if you use it for anything other than washing your hands, you have to put down a towel) and our very standard kitchen sink. I wash my face in the kitchen sink. I also clean my paintbrushes in the kitchen sink. These things are normal to me and probably not for a lot of people. Adding this utility sink was *chef’s kiss*. I wanted a very “garage” vibe because I didn’t want to have to worry about the surface if I was cleaning paint brushes, for example. But like, make it chic, right? I found this old workbench on Craigslist and asked Javier if he could make it work to not only house the sink but also cut out a space to put a small fridge Andrew already had in the garage.
The toilet. I LOVE this toilet. My grandmother had the exact one in her bathroom and it’s giving nostalgia. I bought it on eBay, it is vintage but never used. I decided against a door for the toilet room because of limited space. My plan was always a thick curtain and yes, my contractor did think I was weird. We did put in a very loud fan/light to help make it feel more private though.
Walking through that empty space was, I have to admit, very satisfying. Bank account was on E but the bills were paid, and at last, it felt like a real space that people should actually be in. The extra space we created by putting in the shelves in the crawl space and the shed on the side of the house was going to be game-changing for me particularly. The left side of the garage would finally just be mine, I wouldn’t be sharing it with all the misc storage and power tools. I would be able to organize and find props when I needed them. Honestly making space for myself and my career literally, helped me do so figuratively as well. This made my decision to go out on my own as a stylist feel more “official”.
Now we just had to put all of this away:
As you can see, we took out portions of the middle wall. Before there was no way to get from one side to the other without walking outside. We did this for 2 reasons 1) the AC had to be installed on my side of the garage unless we wanted to put it on the front of the house because it’s the only wall that is an exterior wall. We obviously didn’t want the eyesore, not to mention we didn’t want to make any of the doors non-functioning. The opening on either side of the center wall helps with airflow for the mini-split. 2) in order to fit a kitchenette in the space we needed a larger wall to put it against and the plumbing needed to be in the back right corner because of where the water/sewage was under our house (the bathroom upstairs sits right above). The layout just made sense to place an opening in the front and back. I considered just having support beams where necessary through the center and keeping a more visually open layout. After drawing everything this way and that, I realized I needed wall space. My side needed to be primarily shelves and this is an example of when having things closed off more you can actually make more use of the space thus making it feel bigger because you can fit more things in it, vs open so visually “bigger” but not as functional. I had this experience in my upstairs office/guestroom/workout room. The more stuff I put in it the bigger it felt because I could now use it for so much more than when it just had a couch and a dresser.
It was a few months before we had furniture from Article, which was ok, we needed to unpack a lot of boxes and I had a lot of measuring and planning to do on my side of the garage. One of the first things I bought was a custom jute rug for the right side. Custom rugs on Etsy are my favorite. I had a few smaller vintage rugs I wanted to layer in to warm up the space and separate out the different areas, but the jute rug helps keep it all cohesive.
The rug is 7’ wide by 17’ long. It helps with sound, coziness, and warmth in the winter. We measured and taped out the furniture but for a couple of months, Andrew lived with folding tables as we unpacked and planned.
On my side, I picked out shelving and figured out how I could display and store my throws and towels at the same time. I settled on wall-mounted curtain rods.
I was fresh off of a project where the designer William Hunter and I used vintage textiles in some really unconventional ways and was feeling very inspired. I got to work finding vintage fabric for the curtain to go under the sink and to be the toilet “door”. As well as sourcing custom curtain rods and rings for said curtains.
As life goes, this is what it looked like for a few months. I wanted the space to feel textured and layered and vintage so on and on I sourced for cabinets and lights and towel hooks and toilet paper holders and trash cans etc etc while we waited for Article furniture to arrive and then…
YAY!! So exciting!! So THANKFUL!
And here’s where we would cut to pretty photos Sara took but…
bum bum BUM….
My
Garage
Flooded
Again.
…
..
.
I honestly don’t know if I have the capacity to write about this, emotionally speaking. Maybe that’s why I’ve been having such a hard time getting this blog written. I got the furniture, we set it up, we were waiting for a few vintage pieces to show up, I turned FORTY, I finally finished organizing every single prop I owned, physically and digitally, and then it rained. And rained and rained and rained. The sump pump failed (don’t they always) and that added to the problem. The 17” long rug? SOAKED. New drywall? Soaked. Beautiful new polished concrete floors? Cracked, with water coming through the seams.
There aren’t words.
And apparently, there aren’t photos either. I think I made Andrew deal with it while I disassociated? He doesn’t keep photos because he doesn’t believe in the cloud and saves all his photos on actual hard drives like he’s 100 years old. I have to finish this blog so we don’t have time for that. Just imagine pretty much the finished photos I’m about to show you but then also WET. It was sooooooo cool.
I do have exactly one photo of the sump pump failing:
Taken around 1 am and sent to Javier in a panic. This contractor experience was very different though. Javier came over, in the middle of the night and wet-vac-ed (not a word) for hours. Over the following weeks (as it continued to rain) they repaired all the water damage, figured out where things were still failing, and fixed them. At least we all hope. He’s actually coming over next week to look over a few things before our next rainy season starts. Y’all, I may be fighting a losing battle. We’ll see.
I think this is a good place to pause. Tomorrow I will be back with the conclusion of this saga. Please come back and fire off any questions in the comment section below.