The Much-Anticipated Garage Update

Remember those old pictures I showed you of the garage? How it used to look like this?

Then (thanks to one fallen hammer and its replacement—oh, and a little effort from Denny, I guess), for a while it looked like this?

Well, now it looks like this!

You see, a couple of weekends ago, Denny’s parents came up to see the house for the first time and they brought with them a few tools and a lot of desire to help out around the place. Denny’s mom brought up her old mower and by some miracle managed to turn our knee-high, freshly-rained-on yard into this manicured beauty:

(And, no, I didn’t mess with the color saturation on that picture, it just ended up being that gorgeous that day!)

And Denny’s dad helped Denny construct a new workbench in the garage! They built this solid, little bugger in about an hour and a half and, let me tell you, it’s a vast improvement over the old one. For example, instead allowing the green structural beam there to inhibit them, they carefully built around it, like so:

This allowed them to get an extra two and a half feet of useable workspace and helped support the longer bench. It also helped make it possible to move the left end of the bench further away from the fuse box, so now not only is it up to code (always a plus) but I also don’t have to worry (as much) about sticking my hands in spider webs when I go to access the breakers!

Oh, and in case you’re thinking to yourself, “But they got rid of all that storage, those silly geese,” here’s a little comparison of house much space we actually gained by tearing down the old, not-really-all-that-functional shelving.

Before:

After:

That’s a lot of real estate! We probably tripled the amount of actual bench and, since we have plans to install shelving and drawers in the future, we definitely won’t be missing that ratty old spider-infested unit. This is what we hope the bench will look like one day soon:

Only, ya know, not grey, green, and animated. ;)

PS: Like my goofy graphics? I've been using Picnik for my photo editing. It's easy to navigate and way cheaper than buying Photoshop. I highly recommend it, if only because it has a teeth-whitening option for pictures of people. Oh, and the basic version is free, which is pretty cool, too.