As often happens when I'm off of working on my house stuff for a while - this time it was a dislocated shoulder and then a bunch of SCA sewing - I come back and go, "Where was I again? Oh, wait, I know: LET'S REORGANIZE THE WHOLE GARAGE!" So I did. Yesterday. All in one shot, in like seven hours. Bit of help from a friend who was kind enough to come over and pitch in, to keep me from killing myself, hehe.
So, somehow I neglected to take proper
Before pics of the first stage of the garage cleanup, so I give you a comprehensive "before" via
Icovia Space Planner:
This is called "inexcusable." You'd see why if I had an actual photo; I'm not kidding about the crap all over the floor. There was a bike out in the middle of nowhere, and a 25' extension ladder, piles of lumber all over the place. All of that could have simply been cleaned up (just a case of setting stuff down at random instead of putting it away properly); but the major issue in the garage was that
- The camping gear (blue and green above), which consists of my own camping gear as well as all the community gear for my women's festival that I go to nearly every spring, was in one big mountain of stuff that was in my way, and constantly falling over onto my other stuff.
- The wall of wooden shelves (#1 and 2 at the far left on the diagram) was great, but the way it was located meant that half of all my stuff was in this wall, and the other half was elsewhere in the garage. There were tools here, but the rest of the tools were on the east (bottom) wall. There was garden stuff here, even though the rest of the yard tools and garden stuff was up top (west) by the water filtration stuff.
Since the festival stuff was out of the way for the weekend (it was last weekend; I didn't make it this year), I took the opportunity to do something about both of these issues, by unloading and moving all of the wall units, and re-organizing everything:
Here's the larger of the two shelves moved from the north to the west wall. I hung my extension ladder above it - I rarely use it.
Several months ago I primed the walls and ceiling in the garage, except for what was behind this shelving; yesterday, I finished the priming while I was moving stuff
That same shelf, re-loaded with (L-R) automotive and electrical stuff, as well as my aquarium junk; paint and stain; and gardening stuff. The large garden tools hang on the wall to the right of the shelf, so now all of my gardening stuff is togerther! Yay!
A really poor-quality after shot of the same corner and shelf, with a bit more of that north wall showing. That's my camping gear all stacked up neatly under the electrical breaker box. The big hole is where the festival gear will live once it comes home tonight.
(Yeah...I worked from breakfast to sundown on this, so I had lost the light for the "after" pics, sorry).
A "before" shot of the northeast corner of the garage: the other wooden shelving unit where the camping gear is in the previous picture, with piles of crap all over the place, including the "shelving" on the east wall which is made up of stacks of smaller shelves, and boards and cinder blocks. Sigh.
Here's the same corner, with the wooden shelves moved and the camping gear stacked against the wall in its new spot. Again, sorry for the picture quality.
So, this is what it looks like now. I still have some work to do in here: there are still two stacks of lumber where there should be one; some of which I'd like to actually build something with (for once!) to get it out of the way. The boards old board-and-cinder block shelving is about to become a new work bench top to replace one that I have that's falling apart (not pictured; it sits perpendicularly to the "large work bench"). And, of course, I still have some mess on the floor to clean up.
But half the garage is done, and in one day!
Next up for the garage is to get the rest of the mess cleaned up, which means using up some materials on other projects in the house, and I'll post about those. Some of that includes the new work bench I mentioned a moment ago. Now that all the walls are primed in the garage, I need to figure out what color I actually want to paint the walls; partly because the amount of old paint I hoard have is ridiculous, and I need to start using it up soon before it all starts going rotten. Some of it will go on the garage walls, as well as my guest bathroom and hallway, the living room ceiling, and the kitchen cabinets.
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| Eventually, we end up here. |
Stay tuned!
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