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On Location

Converting a Garage Outside Seattle Into a Tiny Home

Michelle de la Vega picked this garage as a good project to tackle after a divorce. Credit...Ira Lippke for The New York Times

SEATTLE

SITTING on the couch in her 250-square-foot house — a garage she has transformed into her version of a dream home — Michelle de la Vega, a visual and performance artist, held a pillow in her arms. Three more pillows hung in shadowboxes on the wall above her, and a few hundred more, she said, were in an art studio nearby, part of an installation called “Dream House,” a tribute to her father.

Made of paper, the pillows are decorated with the elaborate architectural drawings her father made during her childhood in Santa Barbara, Calif. “He always had a hideaway in our tiny garage where he recorded his dream houses,” she said. Her father, however, was not an architect but a former combat Marine suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, who coped by losing himself in an imaginary world of suburban splendor.

When Ms. de la Vega was in high school, the financial stress resulting from her father’s condition caused her family to lose their small house, she said, so “the meaning of having a house — or not having one — is significant in my family.”

Ms. de la Vega, 40, bought the garage and the house in front of it several years ago, for $208,000, with money from a divorce settlement.

“At that time I was coming out of the ashes,” she said, “and knew I needed to come up with a good survival strategy for starting over as a single person.”

Top Hat, her new neighborhood — a whimsical name inspired by the sculpture of a hat perched atop a nearby transmission shop — was an appealingly inexpensive choice for Ms. de la Vega, who had been living with her husband in the more upscale neighborhood of Wallingford. It was also multiethnic, which was important to Ms. de la Vega, whose father is Filipino and Nicaraguan.

To generate a steady income, she decided to rent out the main house and turn the squat, diminutive garage into her home. And rather than hiring someone else to supervise the renovation, she was the general contractor.

“I was somewhat out of my mind,” she said. “But it was also fantastic. I was hiring, firing and contending with men and their power tools for a good nine months.” Her decision paid off. The entire renovation cost only $32,000.

The new house incorporates much of the garage’s original structure, but Ms. de la Vega raised the framing four feet to accommodate a sleeping loft. She also added space for a bathroom and installed a wood-burning stove left by the previous owner. Lovingly cleaned, it is now the heart of the house, and provides a cozy hedge against the Pacific Northwest’s damp climate.

The stove is only one example of an old fixture Ms. de la Vega rescued from obscurity. Top Hat is south of the city, near the area’s steel mills, shipyards and Sea-Tac Airport, so it offers access to a number of salvage yards, including Pacific Industrial Supply, Boeing Surplus and Second Use, all of which she scoured for appropriate additions to her house. The metal ladder to her sleeping loft, for instance, was once on a ship; the tall silver lockers that are closets are from a United Airlines maintenance building.

“The garage and the elements in it are all defunct, unwanted things that were reclaimed and given new life,” she said. “Given where I was coming from, building it was a deeply redemptive experience.”

Smaller salvaged fixtures punctuate the otherwise minimal interior: a series of industrial latches serve as towel hooks in the bathroom and kitchen; the rusted feet of the old bathtub that now sits in a wooden cradle are displayed like sculpture on the brick mantel above the wood-burning stove.

In the process of outfitting the interior, Ms. de la Vega became so enamored of these metal objects that she decided to go to welding school to learn how to build furniture and architectural fixtures. “I’m fascinated by metal as a material because it’s beautiful and to a great degree unforgiving,” she said.

Evidence of this new passion is scattered throughout the house: on top of the lockers, there are “Star Wars” -like welding masks; hanging in the bathroom, a pair of industrial bib overalls; and sitting next to the stove, a pair of artful metallic objects “called Johnson Solids,” she said, that she welded in an industrial tent in her driveway.

In the minimalist kitchen, there is a small camping stove, but the blender takes center stage, an arrangement that hints at another passion: raw food. Ms. de la Vega’s garden is filled with raised planting beds, where she grows lettuces, beans, snap peas and tomatoes during the area’s short growing season.

It was on a trip to Home Depot in 2007 to buy the materials to build these planters that Ms. de la Vega met Robin Cady, a rockabilly acoustic bassist she recognized from concerts around town. Mr. Cady also works as a contractor, which brought things full circle in her mind.

“Our first date was Robin coming over to fix my hot water heater,” she said.

Not long ago, she and Mr. Cady moved into the main house — they are now married — but Ms. de la Vega still keeps all her clothes in the garage, which she thinks of as her personal sanctuary. The kitchen and bathroom are reserved for her use alone as well.

Ms. de la Vega considers the house an ongoing renovation project. She is working on the design and fabrication of a metal-and-glass awning over the main door.

“It would be tragic to think of it as actually being done,” she said. “Did I mention that I also have a fantasy about beekeeping?”

A correction was made on 
May 6, 2010

An article on April 22 about a garage near Seattle that was converted into a house misstated the surname of the homeowner’s husband. He is Robin Cady, not Cary.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Driveway Appeal. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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