Building a Garage

So the neighbors behind us are having a garage built and the delay it is taking has got me to remembering the first garage we contracted to have built.

A garage is actually a pretty simple thing to build — the hardest part is the garage pad. So back when we needed a garage at our first home, I was tempted to build it myself. Luckily my wife talked me out of it.

See, a garage is simple, but if you don’t know what you are doing you’ll spend forever on it. And now in our second ‘subdivision under construction’ I see it all the time, the garages taking days, even weeks to be built. And by contractors, no less — not just homeowners. This particular garage I’m watching being built was started Saturday (walls put up) and since then someone (it is now Thursday) has come out sporadically and all the roof pieces are ready but not put up.

As the homeowner I’d be pissed.

See, that first garage we had built was done in two days. The first day all the structural was finished. The next day a siding guy came out. After he was done the electrical guy whizzed thru. On the third day we were using our garage.

The company we used is called Ronnex and I got the impression from talking to the owner that often he can get the entire garage done in a single day, in our particular case the subtrades hadn’t quite lined up their schedules. And his bid was one of the lower bids.

And quality?

Per the bylaws in our subdivision our second house, being a corner lot, required a garage at time of building. Which meant we had to have our builder, Summerhill, put it up. It cost us about $25000 to have Summerhill do this — twice what Ronnex had charged for our first garage. And the quality is not nearly as good as Ronnex — siding is loose, we’ve had multiple problems with the garage door, and the nailing job was pretty lame, lots of nails going through the walls, hitting studs at awkward angles.

Anyways, I’ll stop spying on the neighbors and get back to writing.

BTW I checked out the Ronnex webpage and they may have new owners… we used them about five years ago so their process may have changed — hopefully not.