Roger Bikes

Tag: house

  • 2021 Review

    2021 Review

    What a wild year. The sequel to 2020 ended up exceeding 2020 by a bit and it hasn’t slowed up as we head into 2022. The United States capitol building witnessed its largest physical attack since the War of 1812. The global pandemic of whatever COVID is now called continued to grow and mutate and keep on going.

    On the positive side a lot of good and great things happened in 2021. We built a house and moved in! Our jobs are going really well. The James Webb space telescope was launched after 20 years of development and avoiding pirates.

    On Jan 1 I wrote about my plans for the year. I hit a few and missed some others. I did not conquer the pull up, We did build a house. I did not quite achieve blogging everyday, but I did post in 10 of the 12 months! I only made two complete woodworking projects: a wall mounted lumber rack and some shelving for the garage. I exceeded my bike riding goal of 2600 miles with a total of 3141 miles! Finally I increased my volunteer time and effort with the Mancos Trails Group significantly.

    Overall I am really happy with how I did with my goals. The main one was the house and I think just completing that would have been more than enough to satisfy me. I am glad that I was able to get some of the other goals as that meant I was able to distract myself from that huge project. Building a house is a really big goal and I am happy that we don’t have to do it again.

  • Weekend projects – Workshop lights and shelving – 05/100

    Weekend projects – Workshop lights and shelving – 05/100

    A few days ago I talked about how we designed much of our house. I left out talking about the basement and the garage. Both of those parts of the house were under my purview and direction. Some day I will talk about the basement but today let’s checkout some of the garage.

    There were a number of considerations for both having a garage and using a garage. Colorado gets pretty cold in the winter. Having a garage means your vehicle is not an ice block in winter mornings. I also like to work on my bikes and build the occasional woodworking project so a workshop was key.

    We built the garage big enough to park both vehicles, and have room for a workshop. At the time of drawing the house we had a 22′ long truck. In the middle of the house build we sold the truck and got a smaller vehicle. Basically my workshop doubled in space. Bonus!

    Let there be light!

    While the house was being built I started thinking about planning out the workshop, and purchased the Weekend Woodworkers Workshop course to help with that. One of the first things I learned from the course was upgrading my lighting to their suggested LED shoplights. Originally I was thinking these would be the only lights in the Garage, but Kate suggested otherwise after seeing how bright they are.

    Garage workshop basic lights
    Basic lighting

    To start with I only setup 5 of the 10 lights from the kit and I am really happy with them. My workspace has very few shadows allowing me to see what I am working on. Setup was really easy. Decide if you want to plug them into an outlet, or hardwire them to be used by a wall switch. I chose the outlet option since these are secondary lights in the garage. Then I decided I wanted to focus on the southwestern corner of the garage.

    Garage workshop super awesome lights
    Power levels are above 9000!

    Getting organized

    One of the first projects of the course is a shelving unit that is focused on preventing putting too many items on the shelf. It does this by not being very deep so you cannot hide a tool behind another tool. This keeps things visible and accessible, which helps encourage their use, and keeps the project moving instead of searching.

    We have some leftover wood from the trim that is really pretty Knotty Alder so I used some of that to build the self. The course gives excellent instruction and tips for ways to work safer, faster, and more efficient.

    Shallow wood shelving
    Boo yeah!

    I judge how a project went by Kate’s reaction. In this case she asked me to make her one, so I think it came out pretty well. 😎