The Garage - Part I

  It has been awhile since I have updated the blog.    There are a lot of excuses;   Easter weekend,  birthday parties,  fishing, and lawn care etc.  With Spring coming on, I made up my list of things to do for the summer of 2012 (it seems like some of those things were on the list to do for the summer of 2011).      One of those projects on the list was to work on organizing my garage.   What was once a two car garage with plenty of room has become a one car garage and a shop.   Or a one car garage with a shop, garden center, and a place to pile boards, bikes, and additional tools.   Obviously,  it may be time to have a garage sale.  

      The first thing we did this spring was we changed our garage doors.   While this is something that I feel that I have the talents to do, the wife felt like it was something that we should hire done.   (I think because the garage doors were on the 2009 list of things to do.)   Anyway the two man crew whistled in and  six hours later they drove away with the project done.   Everything seems to work great.    Of course I had them leave the old doors and hardware, thinking I could add them to my wood scrap pile.  (Now the space hardly qualifies as a one car garage.)  

On the inside of the garage, I decided to tackle the South wall first.    To the right is a before picture.    For tool storage there was this 2x4 nailed to the wall with additional nails driven in at various intervals to accommodate whatever tool one might want to hang up.   This is the way it was when we moved in and it was my hope to improve this system someday.  (I think that hope was on my 2008 things to do list.)   So I started by moving everything away from the wall, pulling out any kind of nails that were driven in the wall (and there were a lot of them  - nails must of been cheap way back when.)

   Once I got all the nails out of the wall, I went back and filled in all the nail holes with Spackle.    Then I took all the hardware off of the old doors and neatly piled it up out of sight on the north side of the house.  (The neighbors to the North have to love my new scrapping hobby.)    I've heard there is money in scrap iron.   I  am thinking that I almost have 200 pounds.   (It's just a start.)    Once the old garage doors  were broke down into sections, I found that each section or one of the sections would make a nice bench top when placed on a couple saw horses.  They were pretty sturdy.    (Look at the heavy weight in the middle and it doesn't even bend.)

        To the right is the finished south wall.    The wall with the garage doors and this wall have been painted.    So, I'm half done.   (Painting is such a pleasure.)     Next week, I'm digging in the scrap wood pile to seen if I can build something out of wood to replace all those nails that held the shovels and rakes.