Year: 2025

Garage Electrical

February 22, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’m still playing catch-up on projects, so this story takes place in September. With the garage construction mostly wrapped up, the electrical was on us to complete ourselves, since the fairly reasonable quote we originally got ballooned when we asked for electrical vehicle charging to the point we just said no thanks.

The first step was to dig a trench from the house to the garage. Normally, this would use a trenching tool that you can rent from Home Depot, but our back porch is only two feet from the property line that has a fence running along it, which means that close to half of the trench would need to be dug manually. The cost and effort of the trencher to do less than half of the digging didn’t seem worth it, so instead we dug the whole thing by hand.

Sarah and I, with help from the kids, managed this over a couple of weeks. We needed to account for a few extra steps, including an underground downspout, a separate conduit for networking, and a tight corner between the porch footing and the row of junipers we’d planted last year. Since the downspout pipe needed to cross the electrical as well as slope down, we dug out something like a highway exit ramp and overpass.

The electrical conduit could be made of Schedule 40 PVC, but above ground could not, so I transitioned to metal conduit. This meant picking up a pipe threader that could handle 1-1/4″ pipe but I found a cheap one from Vevor that worked well. It still required Sarah to stand on the wooden beam I screwed the pipe clamp to while I used a breaker bar on the ratchet mechanism. We managed to collapse a short pipe section doing this and had to start again.

It took a couple tried to snake the heavy gauge wire through the conduit clear from one end to the other, especially given the jog in the conduit, but after a couple of tries and staggering the wire ends before taping them together we successfully pulled the bundle through and got the whole mess from the panel in the basement to the subpanel in the garage.

Subpanel before we connected everything

Dean arrived to help with the next stage. With his help we got the ends on both sides terminated and the breakers installed as well as put the grounding rods in. We also bent some conduit in the garage to run a couple of outlets including one for the garage door opener as well as the 50-amp EV charger outlet and a circuit for lights. I hooked up the new garage door opener as well as an exterior light on the back yard side. Amazingly, everything worked on the first try and the circuit tester confirmed good ground and neutral.

Eventually, we plan several more outlets and better lighting, but this let us charge our truck at home on something better than an extension cord for the first time, which was dramatically faster. That, along with being able to open and close the overhead door with a button instead of getting out to open and close the gate on the yard as we come and go has made the garage a big quality of life improvement.

The low voltage conduit allowed me to run Internet out to the garage and install a Wifi extender, helpful when working in the garage as well as to keep the smart garage door opener and electric truck happy. It also allowed me to hook up the DVR for our security cameras, but I’ll cover that system in another post.

City Troubles

February 5, 2025 / / 0 Comments

In my last post, about the Garage build, I mentioned we got a stop work order from the Building Department claiming our permit was invalid, which they later agreed was incorrect and allowed us to proceed. Unfortunately, that isn’t the end of the story. At the conclusion of that email with the building inspection supervisor, he indicated he would try to ‘pull back’ the case and if he couldn’t it would be dismissed.

We then received several copies of a summons from the city to attend a hearing on the violation. There was an option to avoid the hearing by providing the necessary evidence of remediation to the inspector beforehand, so I contacted him asking what I needed to do.

After some back and forth, he called me on the phone, and after I explained that we weren’t developers, flippers, and we lived in the property, he agreed that this could be dismissed. Apparently the city has changed how they manage permits and they have enacted a process for cancelling them after a period of inactivity which ours fell into. Since we’d gotten the permit to build the garage as part of the permit to remodel the house, but decided it was too expensive to do both at the same time, we delayed the garage build until this past summer. We checked at that time and the permit was active on the portal, but after we received the notice of violation, the permit disappeared from the portal.

We still had the physical copy with signed inspections on the back, but it was still disconcerting to feel like the evidence we had a permit was being deleted. In any case, the supervisor asked me to send all the details to him in an email which he would then forward on to the people that do the hearings and ask them to dismiss, which I promptly did.

With the deadline nearing and no word back, I emailed again and got an out of office from the supervisor. I followed up via email again but realized that while he had called me, I didn’t have his phone number and I couldn’t find it on the city website. Finally, the day of the deadline, he called back and after I reminded him who I was and what I was trying to do, he found the email with the details and sent it on to the hearing department requesting they dismiss the case, which they did.

This whole ordeal was stressful, but ultimately it worked out without serious problems. The garage was finished and we didn’t get fined. The fact it all stemmed from an E311 complaint by an “unknown” neighbor did sour some relationships, though.

Garage Build

January 14, 2025 / / 2 Comments

Ok, the short version is we have a garage now. I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this and not just looking at the photos, that you want the play-by-play. Once again, I’ve done a poor job of keeping up with blogging, but I’m trying again.

With Sarah and I temporarily moving the neighbor’s fence back a couple of feet the length of the garage, we had a few conversations with them about why that was happening, but they were concerned about the garage being up to the property line. Their contractor had told them that was against code. I showed them our plan and permit and explained that applied to frame garages, and the reason we were building a masonry garage was so that we could build up to the line.

Work went quickly at first. The spread footings were poured two days after my last post. Forms and rebar were in two days later, and the footings were poured the day after that. The forms came off the next day, gravel was spread and block was delivered. If you’re not keeping track, this is July 15th. By the 18th, the walls were up to ceiling height, steel was installed over the garage door opening, and the roof framing was in. The contractor had told us they estimated six weeks, which seemed incredibly optimistic, but so far, so good.

At this point, Sarah and I went on a trip for our fifteenth anniversary. While we were enjoying a tropical paradise, I got a voicemail from the contractor that the city had stopped work because the permit was bad and slapped a big ‘ol orange sign on the front of our house. When we got back a couple of days later, I found that the 311 complaint number wasn’t valid and the phone number of the inspector was disconnected. However, the email address of their supervisor was correct so I contacted him. He responded that the permit actually was valid and we could resume work and take down the sign, which I did. He said he’d pull back the violation so it didn’t go to a hearing. With that settled, and strong indications of who had complained, work started back up again.

Within a week, now the end of July, the parapet wall was done and a few days after that the exterior was painted. Several days later, the roof went on. About here, things started happening less quickly. The roof and flashing were done by the 22nd of August, and the pad was poured the following day. At this point we figured we needed doors, windows, and some cleanup and we could call it done. Emailing with the contractor, we found he hadn’t ordered the side doors yet. His price was much higher than quoted, so we decided to shop for ourselves, which prompted me to go double check the measurements.

That’s when we discovered there was an issue. When they put the footings in, they didn’t leave a notch for the rear access door. We pointed that out and they left the door opening and said they would come back and notch the door, which they never did. The slab was poured by a sub that assumed the height was where it was supposed to be and sloped accordingly. As a result, all of the door openings were too short. Our 8′ garage door was less than 91″ and our 80″ access doors (which need an 82.5″ rough opening) were under 80″. I let the contractor know, and the next day his overhead garage door installer showed up and let him know the same thing.

To fix this, obviously weren’t going to take out the whole slab, so instead they came back with a telehandler, cut out a course of cinder blocks, lifted the whole steel beam up, and made all of the door openings taller. I was impressed how they pulled this off and in the finished product you’d never know. Masonry was definitely their specialty and they did that part really well.

With things dragging, I was anxious to get the neighbors to the North their sidewalk back. The contractors had left a piece of rebar embedded in concrete where their pavers had been and ignored all of requests to fix it. I finally broke the concrete out myself and cut down the pavers to fill back in. With a hose, a little polymeric sand, and a broom, I got it looking like it did before and I reinstalled the gate, which required way more reconstruction than I hoped, but I got it done in the end. Getting out of the other neighbor’s yard required us to build a new fence, which I’ll leave for another post.

Sarah and I picked up the access doors ourselves and dropped them off. They got them installed along with the windows, but left the Great Stuff sticking out everywhere. We had agreed to paint them, but the overhead door went in with bare 2x6s and no flashing. They left the flashing in the back of the garage, so clearly they intended to install it. I wound up painting that too and Sarah and I got a sheet of Hardie trim to clad the 2x6s, but they wound up coming back and putting aluminum flashing on it after all.

Finally parked in the garage! (Before we got the flashing and painted the doors)

Finally, on September 20th, the slab had been curing long enough and the overhead door was installed so we were able to park in the garage. This coincided with street cleaning day, which was convenient. The garage door installer also installed the opener I told them I didn’t want. I wanted a wall-mounted unit, plus at this point there wasn’t power in the garage, since the contractor quoted us way too much to put in an electric charging circuit.

It’s been a dramatic lifestyle improvement to be able to park in the garage. Street parking while it was under construction was a hassle, and before that manually opening and closing the gate to the yard as we came and went was a chore. I’ll go into some details on the electrical, garage door opener, and other details in a future post.