My Grand Design 03

More progress on my garage.

First an apology to my whopping audiene of 4 blog readers: I'm sure you are tired of reading about my sad little 1.5 car garage but believe me, I'm just as sick of working on the garage as you are of reading about it. Nailing wood together and mudding drywall is the work of savages compared to the civility of wrenching on bikes. The good news is I can see the light at the end of the tunnle my garage project and I'm expecting more parts soon. So we'll return to our regularly schedule programming soon.

First things first though. I tossed the soft-as-mud wood screws that my main 8' bench was (unfortunately) built with. If your reading this and are new to building things with wood, do yourself a favour and avoid using these fiendishly aluring gold plated wood screws. They are about as good as screwing wood as a stick of butter. Look into deck screws or construction screws.

Wood screws in their rightful place

I got my main 8' bench done and my secondary 6' bench done. I coated everything with a nice thick layer of high gloss lacquer over it for maximum protection. Both benches are shimmed as level as it's ever going to get and I'm overall very pleased with how they turned out.

These new benches double my old work surface!

The next thing I took care of was that annoying shelf you see in the picture above. That shelf had bugged me for years because it was only good for piling stuff onto. You couldn't really organize anything on it and it got in the way of other things I wanted to put up like cabinets. Really, it was the wart on the backside of my garage; not only was it useless and painful in and of itself, but it prevented other things from getting done as well.

As you can see in the last picture, I was a little too enthusiastic with my hammers. The next thing to do was install cabinets. Now when I drew out my garage layout way back when, I used the dimensions of the first set of cabinets I found on the Canadian Tire website. What I didn't realize was that those cabinets were around $170 each! That would sum up to a staggering $680 for just 4 cabinets!

Those cabinets ain't cheap ...

So I went with these cheaper MDF cabinets that hold a decent amount of weight (30 lbs on each shelf) but more importantly cost only $225 for 3. I only need 3 because each cabinet is quite a bit larger than the one in my drawings.

... but these ones are

And up they go!

One thing I would say though is that you get what you pay for. These MDF cabinets were about as weak sauce as any other MDF product I've had the displeasure of owning in my lifetime. I'd eventually like to get some steel cabinets but that's for another day. For now I just needed funcional storage (even if it will far apart in a few years).

While I had been tearing things down and putting things up, my work benches got quite the work out and I'm happy to say that they held up nicely. They're not wobbly, haven't warped and the lacquer held up beautifully to dropped hammers, nails, drills and screw drivers (yes my fingers are very buttery).

After a quick clean up, it was time to restore the most important piece of equipment in my garage, the TV and PS3. I need to be entertained while I work.

So there we are, as of this morning that's what my garage looks like. I still need to install a peg board under the cabinets and some of the wires and cables routes need to be finalized. Other than that, it's just alot of cleanup.