Garage Projects # 1

    My garage is also part of my shop area.    In fact a big part.   Sometimes I have the walls of the garage so lined up with tools and lumber that it is almost to the point that once you drive the car or pickup into its parking spot you have to really suck in the gut in order to exit the vehicle. (For me that is a lot of sucking.)   It works okay, but lately I have been reading up on ways to organize my space.
   If you look at the "Handyman" web site or if you look at "This Old House's" web site you can find some good ideas for garage storage.  Last spring I found some cabinet plans in a issue of Shop Notes.    That is what I was working on this week.  Of course I tweaked the plans slightly.

        I did use up some of my scrap lumber for this project, but also I did spend some bucks out of my little slush fund to buy a sheet of 3/4 inch plywood.  
       I cut this sheet into 6 vertical pieces.   These were the pieces used for the sides and the divider.  I have to admit that it was fun to work with new wood for a change.  The rest of the project was made from pieces out of my scrap wood pile. (I have been hitting the scrap wood pile kind of hard lately.   Still there seems to be a quite a pile left.)

  In the picture to the right, it shows the boards that I used for the tops and bottoms of the two cabinets that I was building.    I made these by gluing some old kitchen shelves that I had been given a while back.   These shelves were from an old cabinet and the wood was pine.   They had a coat of green paint on them which I did not try to remove.    The nice part is that they were 12 inches wide.    I'm guessing that they were about 70 years old.

  My goal was to make two cabinets and to place the smaller one on the top.    Since I was using up  pieces of scrap plywood for the shelves, I did not spend a lot of time making fancy shelve brackets.   I simply mounted small strips of lumber that were rounded over (and even sanded smooth) along the sides and made it so that I could slide the shelves in and out.    The idea was that if someday I would need a taller space, I could simply remove one of the shelves.

    I love doing projects like this because there is very little sanding.   I did not stain or varnish anything.   Maybe I will regret that later, but for now it is a work storage area.    And it seems to be working just fine.

   I am a little disappointed in the picture to the right as the project is nice and square and looks good.  

 Now the wife can get in and out of the car with the greatest of ease.   I still need to do some work on the pickup side of the garage.   (Of course quite often the pickup sits outside because that sucking in the gut gets a little tiresome.)

   Next week we'll show how we made a couple of the portable tools a little more portable.