Garage Work

As a part of my recent home reorganization project, I've been spending a lot of time building shelving, a new workbench, and other organizational solutions, many of which I find on Pinterest. Only a few of the things in the garage stayed put. The main goals were to find room for a new freezer, get the mill and lathe on their tables, and *gasp* park the minivan in there.

A lot of the stuff moved into the shed. I have another post about that which I started more than a month ago and have managed to procrastinate very well so far, mostly due to the work that I'm showing here. It's been fun to come up with little solutions. I also bought a Kreg jig which I've been wearing out at an alarming rate. Anyway, here we go.

I got the bikes in the corner, the new bench built, and other stuff situated. There's still lots of stuff to handle, but it's well on its way. I feel like the space is working a lot harder now.

The Pack Rack
This is a rack I made up to handle all my backpacks and other outdoor gear like tents and sleeping bags. It's a mixture of hanging storage and shelving. Here's my Sketchup model.

 The top shelf and middle shelf are for the gear, while backpacking packs hang in the upper middle section. Day packs hang on the lower part, just off the ground. There's also room for stuff hanging against the wall behind the packs. So far it's working out great. I just wish I could have made it more than three feet wide, but I had a space constraint. Here it is installed.

The Material Rack:
I've accumulated a lot of sheet stock like plywood, OSB, and LP siding. I needed to get it out of the way, and since the left side of my garage will be for the mill and lathe, the upper wall space was open. Again, I used the Kreg jig and wood glue like crazy.

The Bench:
Most of the structure came from my previous bench. The hutch is new, though. I reduced the size from eight feet wide to five feet. I mean, when I'm being honest, I will cover the entire surface with garbage not matter how much there is, so I didn't feel bad about reducing it.

The Mud Wall
I wanted some mud room type space and I've seen lots of variations on this on Pinterest. I wanted the standard hooks and shoe cubbies to get the boots and shoes out of the middle of the garage floor. The cubbies are still to come, but I did get the shelves and the hooks together.

I hung this by using the Kreg jig with a non-standard joining method. It allowed me to mount the vertical supports directly into vertical studs behind the drywall. Normally pocket screws are used to join pieces at 90° to one another and the jig is set up with all the lengths set for certain sizes. I played with it a little and adjusted some settings to come up with a very solid mounting method. It turned out really well.

The point of all this work is to make the space more productive rather than just being a large room full of boxes where I don't park my cars. I can't live like that. I can tell I'm on the right track because this weekend I did some car work in the garage for the first time in years. It was nice to bust some knuckles. The space works really well, and I'm very close to being able to park the minivan in there.