Garage Conversion in Ainsdale

Ainsdale. The elevation rendered out so the old door opening stops showing from the street, and the room dry lined and skimmed inside.

What the customer wanted

A garage in Ainsdale that had stopped being a garage years ago and had become the place the bikes and the freezer lived. They wanted a room out of it. The building work, the opening blocked up, the floor built up, a window in, was somebody else's job. Ours was the two halves that decide whether it ends up looking like a room or like a garage with a settee in it: the elevation outside and the lining inside.

The outside

The giveaway on a converted garage is almost always the front. New brick and mortar sit differently against forty-year-old weathered work, and no amount of matching gets a patch to disappear on an elevation that has been standing in coastal weather since the sixties. You can see the whole panel of newer brick from the pavement.

Rendering the elevation is what makes that go away, because it puts one finish across the old work and the new work together and there is no longer a line to notice. That is what the photograph above shows: brick on the left, and the same wall in a through-coloured render on the right. On a house that is already rendered it is a straightforward match. On a brick house it is a decision, and it is usually the whole elevation rather than the one panel, so the finish reads as deliberate.

The inside

A garage wall is cold and usually solid, so the lining is not just about getting a flat surface. Insulated plasterboard goes on where the specification calls for it, on dabs or on battens depending on what the wall is doing, and the ceiling is boarded under the existing structure. Every joint is scrim taped, every angle beaded, then the whole thing is skimmed as one so it reads as a room and not as a lined box.

It is worth saying plainly what is not ours. Blocking up the door opening, the floor build-up, damp proofing, the window and building regulations approval are a builder's work and other trades'. We come in for the rendering, the dry lining and the plastering, and we work alongside or after them.

The finish

Outside, one continuous render across an elevation that used to have a garage door in it. Inside, a warm, lined, skimmed room ready for a decorator, with the reveals and the angles straight enough that nothing about it says the space started life as somewhere to park.

A conversion of this size is usually a week or so of our work, split into the outside and the inside, and it fits around whoever is doing the building work rather than holding them up.

The full detail of what a garage conversion involves on the plastering and rendering side is on the garage conversions page, and the lining itself is on the dry lining page. This job was in Ainsdale.

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Areas we cover

Based on Liverpool Road in Southport. We work right along the Sefton coast, down into Liverpool, and inland across West Lancashire as far as Preston. Every town below has a page of its own.

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