Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 10, Reveal For Now

It’s the big TADA or, as most refer to it, Reveal Day for our stone Carriage House gym!

We have been working on this phase of the Carriage House gym expansion for four months! I have documented almost fifty individual work sessions on social media. Truthfully, it was more than that, but I spared you a bit of the tedium.

I have no good or bad value to place on the amount of time this project has taken. It is what it is when you’re DIYing your way through your evenings and weekends. I can’t tell you what tv series is good to watch, but I can tell you my preference for the type of sand to mix up a batch of lime mortar.

So, I’m super fun to hang out with.

However, I know for certain you would not have wanted to hang out with me in our Carriage House before we started this gym expansion project. It was, to put it delicately, unpleasant.

Besides the fact that we had crud piled everywhere because we used this as “chuck it and run away fast” storage area, the walls itself were in rough shape.

So rough, in fact, that we found a snake living in the wall.

Once that image slithers into your mind, it’s hard to unsee it.

We demoed the lime mortar and concrete off of the stone in order to repoint the walls with new lime mortar.

Concrete should never have been used on these walls in the first place as it is exceptionally bad for fieldstone walls and foundations. Among other things, it doesn’t allow the wall to breathe or take on and release moisture as they are designed to do.

Removing the old mortar is a bit tedious because you have to chip out around each and every stone to a depth of approximately 1 inch. Sometimes the mortar crumbles as soon as you touch it and you’ll end up with gaps MUCH larger and deeper than one inch between the stones. That’s okay, but it does mean you’re going to use more mortar to fill it.

More mortar, more money.

We’ve been working off and on for the last 18 months at repointing the stone walls and foundations on our property, and we’ll probably be at for the next 18 years.

It’s hard to estimate how much mortar you’ll need to use before a repointing project starts because you can’t see how big your gaps are going to be until you’ve demoed the old pointing. That stone wall might be in worse shape than you think.

Or maybe your project will escalate like ours inevitably do. The only uncertainty is at which point in the process it’s going to happen.

Toward the beginning of this project, we decided to remove some old pipes from the wall and in the process created a huge hole in the side of the building that had to be repaired with – you guessed it – more stones and mortar.

Speaking of escalating, we did take down an entire stone wall in this course of this gym expansion project.

That’s how the expansion part of this project came to be.

We knocked down an 18-inch thick stone wall to connect two rooms.

The wall removal was planned. The extensive concrete floor repair that came after was not.

But that’s okay because it all worked out in the end.

That view of that crumbling stone wall was transformed into this…

Did you gasp a little?

I swear it’s the same view. Quite the transformation, right?

It deserves all of the TADAs, so let’s do it one more time.

From this…

…to this gorgeous view.

Even the weights don’t detract from how gorgeous it is.

The best part isn’t how it looks.

The best part is how it feels.

When a space is run down and overrun with rodents and snakes, it doesn’t feel good to be there. The ick factor and the negative vibe dampens your mood, and the damp in the building might literally dampen you.

Now, our Carriage House gym is a space that we WANT to hang out in…even if that means working out.

Seriously.

Have you seen a cooler looking gym?

(If you have, don’t answer that. Hahaha!)

Expanding the space means we have more room to maneuver now. Before this project, we had the Smith machine backing up to the fireplace wall and I can’t tell you the number of times we hit our heads on that mantel trying to get the weights on and off the rack. Gluttons for that sort of punishment we are not.

Now, I did mention that this is a reveal for now post. That’s because there are a couple of things we decided to wait on before tackling.

They are semi-permanent sorts of additions, so we thought we should take a few months and use the building as is in order to make sure that these additions are really what we want.

After all, we did just spend time and money repointing that center wall in the building only to tear it down six months later. We’re trying not to learn our lessons the hardest way.

The first thing we are waiting to finish is the section of the building where the pipes and hot water heater are located.

We plan to build a wall to hide the water heater, electrical panel, and pipes. However, we can’t decide how this wall should actually function. Does it have one door to the mechanical closet or two? Is it a sliding door or not? Do we put a TV on that wall? Or would it be better with a mirror? We don’t know yet.

The ceiling in this area will also have to drop down to cover the pipes because moving them only creates more problems. In addition to the drop down, the ceiling will need to be removable so that we can access the pipes and the shut-off valves.

But with our Smith machine placed right in front of that mechanical area, it kind of disguises the fact that the ceiling, in particular, isn’t finished yet. That’s a little bit of a bad thing. Out-of-sight means it might fall off the project list.

The other thing that we are waiting to deal with is the second door into this space.

We don’t need two doors side by side (they are 18 inches apart) that open into the same room. It seems a little extra and not in a good way.

You can see how close they are in the below photo.

The plan is to turn the door on the right into a window because that end of the building could really use some natural light. We could have tackled this part of the project already. The stone work is pretty straightforward.

However, Handy Husband wants to build the window from scratch.

I repeat. Handy Husband wants to build a window with his own two hands.

Yes, we could try and source an old window that matches the other windows in this building. That’s what normal people would do. But have you met us? That would be too easy.

For now, we have sealed off the right hand side door temporarily, and I’m using it to hold our barbell clips. It actually works really great for that!

If you noticed, I’m using wood pegs to organize our barbell clips, but it’s not the only place I’m using wood pegs in this building.

During the repointing process, when I had extra big gaps to fill, I’d sometimes mortar a wood block into the wall instead of a rock. This tactic affords me an easy way to install hooks and pegs now that the building is ready for use.

It’s not a perfect process though. The wood blocks were randomly added to the wall and never in a straight line, so I might not have a block exactly where I want one now. Worse things have happened to me, so I think I’ll be able to cope.

Now that I mention coping, I should probably admit that I’m a little sad to be writing this post.

This project was hard, but REALLY satisfying to work on, and you can’t say that about every single thing you tackle. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to restore this old building, and I’m a little sad that it’s done for now.

Plus, DIY reveals feel a tad bit anticlimactic to me. While I can create a “tada” moment with a video or pictures for others to experience, when you’re DIYing a space and reach the end of the project, there is no singular, “tada” moment.

The start of a project might literally begin with a bang if you’re doing demolition, but the finish almost always comes quietly. Sometimes, so quietly, that you look around and think, “Are we done? I guess we are.” Then you go make dinner.

What do you think of our newly expanded home gym? Do you get a little sad when your projects are over too? Or are you just sad when my projects are over? Haha!

Please tell me everything! You can always comment on this blog post, email me here, or reach out via Instagram or Facebook. I respond to all of your comments and appreciate that you took the time to reach out to me.

Happy DIYing!

P.S. If you missed any of the social media stories that documented each part of this process in detail, I have several “stone gym” highlights saved on Instagram. The stone gym highlights are numbered, so make sure you start at the beginning. Feel free to binge watch those to your heart’s content.

P.P.S. We have the RitFit Smith Machine and weights. It has been great for our home workouts. After almost a year of three of us lifting weights regularly, we think it has paid for itself if you compare it to gym memberships in our area.

Thanks for following along with this project. We appreciate the support and encouragement more than you’ll ever know. If you missed any of the past posts in this series, here they are:

Stone Carriage House Gym Expansion Part 1

Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 2, Demo

Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 3, Old Windows

Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 4, Pipes In Stone Walls

Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 5, Adding a Window In a Stone Wall

Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 6, How to Remove a Stone Wall

Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 7, The Floor Problem

Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 8, Time Capsule

Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 9, The Ceiling

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