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.
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.
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.
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. 😎
