A Tale of Two Hammers

When we first started looking at houses, it became very clear, very quickly that a decent-sized garage was a must-have for us (meaning, mostly, for Denny). And when I say decent-sized, I mean take what a normal person considers to be decent-sized and times that by at least three. You see, Denny races four-wheelers and, since he’s an engineer, he also designs and builds some of his own parts. Therefore, a little more room than usual is necessary for this boy to thrive. In short, Denny’s garage is his castle.

Now, our garage is…borderline, as far as Denny is concerned. Square footage is adequate (for now—we have pretty big plans to expand someday) and it’s sheet-rocked and insulated, which is rather nice. But as far as being functional upon moving in, well, it left a lot to be desired. By this I mean that we knew when we moved in that one of the first projects we needed to tackle was the garage. You see, whoever had lived there before us clearly considered himself to be quite the handyman. He built his own dry-sauna in the corner (read: spider habitat),

 constructed a strange two-tiered “loft,”

 and made a complicated but not really functional workbench and shelves (this picture was taken pre-garbage and recycling service, so please forgive us the mess).

Needless to say, Denny wasted no time ripping all that out (and killing about a million spiders along the way—that’s a true estimate, by the way, not an overstatement AT ALL).

First thing to leave was the sauna. Of course, what looked like a one hour job quickly turned into a full eight hours worth of work. That thing was like the Rubik’s Cube of structures. Only more difficult. With screws. Anyway, what started out like this,

Pretty quickly ended up like this,

But, luckily, not before we got to this:

The moral of that story? Don’t attempt to dismantle a sauna with Ashley’s poor, little, wooden hammer. It won’t hold up under the pressure.

Of course, we then had to run down to Home Depot and get a new (steel-enforced) one, and things progressed pretty quickly from there. The remaining bits of sauna were yanked out and soon Denny was hard at it tearing down the workbench. I swear, I went into the house for twenty minutes and when I came back out, this is what I saw:

I hurried back to snatch up my camera and captured one last picture of Denny triumphantly holding up his kill (at least, I think that’s triumph—or maybe it’s simply his “put down that camera, already!” face, I can’t tell), then it was finished. Well, except for hauling all that spider-infested wood out to the backyard. And I even helped with that, good wife that I am.

The end result was an incredible amount of space gained and a metric ton of spiders killed. All in all, a job well done. Next on our garage list is finishing up the new workbench (which is currently in progress), bug-bombing the place, building some steel reinforcements for the window, installing fluorescent lighting, painting the walls, and treating the concrete floors. I can’t wait to see it completed, if only so that I’ll have a nicer place to visit Denny when he’s working on his bike. ;)