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.

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. ;)