You know we live in a garage, right? Or, more accurately, a finished room off of a garage that used to be an old gas station. You can see why we just call it the garage or the “station”. When I was perusing the aisles of my favorite True Value (Stadium Hardware in Ann Arbor… I’m looking at you) I came across an aisle of organizing equipment.

And I was like, organizing equipment? Who needs that?

And my mother was there and she was like, “You’re putting two of these shelves in your cart, now.”

I have to admit, it will be nice to start of the new year without banging my shins into various boxes and tools every time I want to get to the fridge. Also, there is actual garage work that’s going to need to be done in this room soon. Like with tools.

Here’s an in-progress shot:

My plan here was to get everything into its respective corners and then start the organization process. I’ve already uncovered one workbench under all that mess.

I’ll be back later with an update. In the meantime, you’ve only got a few more hours to enter to win a $150 gift card to use at your local True Value.

Right up until the moment I groggily opened my left eyeball to check my email on Friday morning I believed I was going to spend the better part of this weekend building a barn. Because we have donkeys coming to live with us in two weeks. And maybe you hadn’t caught on, but I was operating with slightly elevated stress levels because of this.

The change of plans came when MysteryMan found out that Tom Petty was playing in Houston in the middle of May. And all of the sudden it sounded like a really good idea to postpone the Hauling Ass Tour a couple of months, which coincidentally will take us conveniently close to Houston at the time Mr. Petty is gracing the great state of Texas with his presence.

Tom Petty, I owe you one.

The void in our weekend left by the absence of barn building was quickly filled in with projects such as priming the Station walls, finishing the basement tile, and prepping the Station cabinets. And–sweet jesus– sleeping.

That is one big, beautiful, blank canvas. I still can’t get over how well that wood ceiling turned out. We tried several paint samples on it this weekend to no avail… regardless we’re still thisclose to having the living portion of the station finished.

And you can see the difference a little primer makes on bringing the texture together. (See how to do it here.)

All in all, I am thrilled at the progress we made, and how the station looks so far. It’s a long way from this…

(No shit, that’s the same view from two years ago.)

Fun things to look forward to this week…

• How to turn a regular cabinet into a sink base
• Tile 101
• Things I learned in contractors class–building a house from the ground up

Seeing as how every joint and corner in the Station has been taped an mudded, its time for MysteryMan to move onto staining and varnishing the wood for the ceiling while I continue on my texturing rampage.

We chose wood for 3 reasons.

1.) Sweet Zeus, not a chance in hell I’m putting drywall up there. Once was enough.

2.) We think the look fits the rustic man-cave feel of the place

3.) As with everything else in the Station, we’re practicing for the house. If we like the look, we’re considering using it in the mini-great room in the house.

Like this, but with a smaller piano. And ceiling height.

I like the warm look as opposed to big white vaulted ceilings. And actually, I like the color of that one as well, and just try replicating that with Minwax.

Not. Easy.

I made the mistake on Garrison to “mix stains” to achieve the perfect dark wood to match my trim. It takes a coat of dark walnut, and then two of  a mahogany stain/poly combo to get the right color, and it’s worth knocking my head against the wall for at least five minutes every time I want to touch-up a piece of wood.

So I promised myself Memorial would have a standard stain color, even though I don’t want all my wood to be matchy-matchy.

So much easier said than done.

Sometimes I think all of you who take the white paintbrush to your trim are on to something.

The overall feel of Memorial will be “rustically elegant” as my aunt puts it.

I’m not sure any of these colors qualify. Like the sear-your-eyeballs out orange in the middle? Yeah, not so much.

I want to keep the wood color lighter with out the washed-out pine look and I’m having trouble finding the sweet spot between, not enough color, way too much color, and is that pink? Because no way will MysteryMan tolerate pink wood on the ceiling, and for that matter, neither will I.

Favorite stain colors anyone?

Last fall when it looked like we were going to try to build a house with our bare hands in twelve weeks– Hi there Insanity!– I spent most of the minutes in my life contemplating colors and materials for the exterior of our house.

We, in fact, spent an afternoon driving around our little slice of Northwest Ohio heaven taking pictures of houses we liked. Then I got an ulcer to compliment the permanent tick in my left eye.

After regaining portions of our sanity and deciding to wait until Spring to break ground, I pushed the unpleasantness of permanent color decisions to a dusty unused corner of my brain, and moved on with more exciting projects… like hanging ceiling drywall all by myself.

But with groundbreaking just two short months away (or less) it’s time to grab the Maalox and paint chips and get back to it. We’ve almost decided on a blue or green for the fiber cement siding, with wood and/or stone accents. Then again, I’m half in love with this combo:

To test out some of my theories I took an elevation of the house…

And photo-shopped the living daylights out of it.

This is a down-and-dirty look at a blue version of the house with cedar shakes along the foundation and stone accents on the kitchen. (Ignore the three goofy windows for now, that is a whole other post.)

And with the stone and cedar reversed…

And then considering a shade of green (though I’ll be honest, I’m leaning towards a blue. There are too many ways to go wrong with a green.)

Ok. I totally just had to take a break to try it in red. I kind of like it, though it may be just a little too much country.

And now you have witnessed exactly half of my crazy. And for my ironic statement of the day, while I’m doing my best to make our new house look like an old barn, we’re also making good progress on turning the old gas station in to something less barn-like and more livable. Luckily I appear to be able to agonize over color choices and hang drywall at the same time, so that’s good news.

Here’s a little tour with way worse photoshopping than you saw above.

The North wall heading into the workshop looked like this last summer:

There has been a slight improvement.

You’re looking at what will be the six linear feet of kitchen space we’ll be eating out of for the next year.

We have room for two 24″ base cabinets, a mini-fridge, a small bar sink, and 3 24″ wall cabinets.

A few inches to the left you’ll find the “living area”.

It’s approximately 10×10 and I think we’ll feel lucky if there is enough room for our 13″ TV. What? We’re high rollers.

Laugh at my TV with old-school antenna if you must.

If you do a one-eighty you’ll find yourself in the light and spacious “bedroom”.

Which I would make fun of, except it used to look like this…

So basically there is nothing to do but shut my mouth and be grateful that we’ll have an actual bed to sleep on.

I’ve decided to build a frame that has some drawer space at the end of the bed, since I’m not anticipating enough space to open drawers from the side. And the closet is, well…

When you account for the water heater, we’ve got enough room in there for about three pairs of underwear each, and that’s it. So if you see two mostly-naked people building a house in the country, you’ll know why.

I’ve actually got some ideas for this closet, including a rack with some dowels on it that we can loop our pants over (does putting pants on hangars drive anyone else up the wall?) Hey… it looks like we’ll have room for a shirt as well. I guess we’ll have to thumb-wrestle for it.

At the moment it looks like we’ll be spending at the very least eight months living in this 400 square feet of space. I hear people do this in New York on the time, which validates a theory I’ve had about New Yorkers for a while, which is that they’re effing insane. Luckily we have three whole acres to spread out on outside, and a bigass workshop attached to our living quarters.

And a house to build in 30 weekends or less. Proving yet again that sanity is a relative thing.

Feel free to count “moving from my refinished 3 bedroom house into a half-finished one room gas station” among the things I thought I never be doing in my thirtieth year on this planet.

I also never thought I’d be planning to drive a pickup truck loaded with a couple of miniature donkeys back from Texas either, but hey, life takes us on mysterious journeys.

But really, look at these guys. You’d take on the road trip of a lifetime for them too. (If you’ve been snooping around you’ll notice the donkeys have rated their own page around here, even though it’s just filled with to-die-for pictures of Cute for now.)

I suppose these are just a few of the things I’m lucky that this guy brought into my life.

Nostalgia aside, all the minutes we were going to have this Winter to get things done in preparation for the big groundbreaking in Spring are slowly ticking away.

Or not-so-slowly, if you look at all of the projects we have yet to finish.

At the moment I’m most excited about getting to the final stages in the man-cave bathroom. When I posted my ideas for a little design help, you all jumped right in with some great thoughts.

Here’s my original color board. (You’ll notice I refuse to call it a “mood board” and I don’t know why I’m so reluctant except to say it brings to mind those cheap ’80′s mood rings. I think “badass board” is more appropriate, don’t you?)

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If you don’t have a flash viewer, you can see the static image here.

SmilingJudy and meryl rose suggested less yellow in the paint color, and a possible red accent.

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Static image here.

On the other end of the spectrum wanderluster and carrie thought the yellow should be a bit deeper, and I took the suggestion of Glidden’s Warm Caramel to heart…

[swfobj src="http://diydiva.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/idea_board21.swf" width="600" height="450"align="center" allowfullscreen="true"]

Static image here.

I’m still contemplating what will go best with the floor tones, and I may even give MysteryMan a say in the final product. Maybe.

I really loved the suggestion for some crusty rusty sign to tie the room together, which got me thinking about what other “art” may be appropriate.

I’m wondering if a couple of 50′s pinups should make an appearance…

Or maybe some vintage Guinness posters?

Finding the right style for the man-cave is turning out to be way more fun than I anticipated.

The six lineal feet of “kitchen” space we’re going to have in the station, on the other hand…whole different story.