As I’ve mentioned once or twice over the past two weeks, I have been in the process of reorganizing my garage to first, clean out some of the junk we’ve thrown in there over the past 21 years and second, to (re)create a workshop space for me. 1
One thing we’ve been able to do consistently is park both our cars in the garage. Given the extremes of weather in western South Dakota, to not use a garage as a garage is, to put it nicely, unwise. However, the dozens of empty packing and shipping boxes, as well as packing materials such as foam peanuts, bubblewrap, and the like, have slowly but inexorably taken over any “free space” there might have been.
To give you some idea of the clutter, here are a few “before” shots:
Step the first was to clear out the clutter. And there was plenty to clear. What I’m not showing here is how I also rearranged the left side of the garage, which included moving the cabinet shown in the center of the shot above, over to the other of the garage.2
Some stuff (not necessarily seen in the photos above) was move to the garden shed. A lot of it was simply thrown out (well, it’s still in the process of being tossed: we can only put so much trash out every Friday without being charged extra). Much of it was moved. My wife made one or two trips to various charities after filling the Previa.
And then there was the sweeping and vacuuming. Note the yellow Shop-Vac in the some of those shots above. It got a workout! In fact, I ended up buying microfiber filter for it because of the dust. South Dakota is windy; in addition, the highway department uses a salt-sand mixture in the winter, and that invariably gets tracked into the garage.
Finally, I cleared enough room so I could get new stuff. Stuff such as a 54” (1.4m) workbench. Under that, I slid a 5-drawer tool cart and 2-door storage cabinet, both on casters. Those three items are Gladiator brand and were from Menard’s (a Midwest home center chain), although not exactly their top of the line. (The top of the line are available at Sears, and cost 2-3 times as much!) I looked first at Sears and Lowe’s, but Sears didn’t have anything I wanted in stock, and Lowe’s offerings weren’t at all what I was looking for.
We got those three items home and set up; unfortunately, I didn’t do a very good job of photo-journalism, so I don’t have any “in progress” shots. The final item was a vertical storage cabinet, and Sears had a pretty nice one in their Craftsman Professional line (which is not even close to their top line!). I ordered that around September 1, and picked it up yesterday.
It barely fit in the Previa, but I was happy to see there were no indications on the carton of possible damage. Mrs K and I started uncrating it (the packing was very good and quite ingenious) but stopped when I saw this:
The lighting was such that I don’t have a really good shot of the damage to the bottom right of the cabinet, but judging from the buckling of both sides, and the lack of damage to the outer carton and packaging, this unit was dropped, hard, before being crated. It’s unbelievable no one noticed this, which leads me to believe the packagers simply figured “We won’t tell, and we won’t be caught.”
We called Sears, and they offered a $30 credit to our account (about 10 percent), which seemed reasonable to me. Functionally, the cabinet is fine, although I did have to pound out some of that area so I could install some of the door hardware. It just made the task of setting it up about an hour longer than it should have been.
Finally, everything is in place. Here are some shots of the finished workshop area. Enjoy!
Now, all I need are some projects to work on…before it gets too cold!
Woot! It looks awesome!