Spackle & Sawdust

I had higher hopes for the finished room — some custom cabinetry and perhaps some painted details — but in the end, I settled for “neat, organized and finished.” On a friend’s suggestion I hacked off the lower two cabinets from an old built-in desk unit that was in the basement (and before that in the previous homeowner’s kitchen) and mounted it at counter height along the back wall to act as a planting station for my wife. I bought a Rubbermaid hanging organizer system for the side walls, which worked out fairly well. Overall, it’s nothing terribly special, but it’s functional, organized and clean. Here’s a before/after picture set:

Before

After:

I’m nearly done with the initial design phase of the basement remodel and hope to begin blogging about that in the very near future.

This past weekend, Mother’s Day weekend, I gave my wife what every mother wants: a silver “mother and family” necklace and a freshly-painted garage!

Mixology

Originally I was planning on heading out to HD and buying a gallon or so of “oops” paint (ya know, the stuff that they mix by mistake and sell dirt cheap) for the walls. But then, a woodworker/remodeller friend of mine suggested a better approach. He keeps a 5 gallon bucket that he uses for all of his left over paint. When he has paint that he no longer needs, he just dumps it in the bucket and uses the mixture to paint non-critical areas — like his garage walls. What a great idea! It also just so happens that I had a dozen or so paint cans of mainly light, neutral-color paint left over from the previous homeowner. Since all of the rooms that used this paint have since been repainted, there was certainly no problem with disposing of the stuff in this manner. I also had just emptied my 5 gallon bucket of “ceiling white” repainting the garage ceiling. So, off goes the bucket cover and in goes the hodge-podge of leftover latex — numerous brands, sheens and colors. The end result — the perfect shade of beige/tan. It was honestly about as close to the color I had in mine as I could have gotten. What luck.

Floored, Redux!

The floors were next. We purchased the house nearly 5 years ago. The original homeowners had taken very good care of the place, including painting the garage floor a lovely shade of battleship grey. Unfortunately, by the time we got it, it had seen better days. About 4 years ago I rented a floor sander, stripped it down and applied a coat of Rust-Oleum’s Garage Epoxy. This looked nice, but I chose a bad time for doing the job. The epoxy pot times vary based on air temp…and the outdoor temperature that day soared to over 80 degrees. This resulted in a rather short pot time — which I exceeded. I found myself running low on usable paint by the end of the second bay. This resulted in pretty poor adhesion in spots.

To prepare for the fresh coat, rather than take the time and money to rent another sander, I decided to use my belt sander on my hands and knees and some 60 grit belts. This worked pretty well (and didn’t hurt nearly as much as I had feared!) And this time, I paid a bit more attention to the kit directions. The weather on Saturday was perfect - it stayed in the 60’s all afternoon. This meant a total 2-hour pot time…plenty of time to finish the job. Some of the spots where the previous coat was removed more completely soaked up the new layer a bit more, resulting in some lower-sheen areas. However, overall I think it looks terrific.

Dressin’ Up the Joint

Finally, I installed a motion-sensitive light switch for convenience, an Insteon-enabled switch for the outdoor lights added to my dusk/dawn timer routine, and replaced the wall plates and the old, dusty GFCI outlet with a new model. I dressed up the window by installing some inexpensive faux-wood blinds.

Hiatus…

Next up, I’ll be moving the refrigerator down off the shop steps and back onto the floor…and then putting this project on hold for a bit so I can move on to the basement remodel. We’ll be turning our basement into a kid’s playroom with a Broadway/”Peter Pan” theme, which I’ll naturally blog about here.

After that’s done I expect to turn back to the garage and put up some cabinets and work surfaces.

Now that the shop is pretty much complete and the weather’s turned a bit more spring-like, I’ve decided to tackle the garage. Since I no longer need it for woodworking, save the odd large-piece assembly, we’re going to revert the space back to a more traditional use: car, bike and outdoor-kid-toy-storage. In addition, we’ll be adding a workspace and storage for gardening tools andn supplies. I also plan to repaint the floor…hopefully this time it’ll last a bit longer without the heavy tools and constant traffic from woodworking. Here are the before shots:

You can see the old lumber rack on the right-hand side. This is being replaced with something a bit more compact and likely moved to the other side.

This weekend I’ve managed to clean out the clutter and apply the first layer of joint compound to patch the myriad holes and nicks in the drywall.

As for my “scrap wood” pile: the DuPage Children’s Museum is a great place for kids — our 1 and 2-year-old really love it there — and they have a spot for wood donations. As I had piles of hardwood and 2×4 cut-offs that I really didn’t want to store in a corner somewhere during the remodel, I ran these over to their donation bin. Much better than tossing it out!

Next up: painting the ceiling, walls and floor!

My original design for the shop included multiple compressed air outlets scattered about the shop. At the heart of this system would be a 60gal Ingersol-Rand 2-stage compressor providing at least 15 SCFM@90psi. Now months later, I’ve significantly revised and downgraded my plans. Part of it was financial, but most of it was a realization that all that I really needed was to be able to use my nail guns without the hassle of dragging out the compressor every time and tripping over hose.

Retractable Air Hose

To that end, I revised my plans and settled on a much simpler setup. I would put my existing 17gal Husky in the crawlspace below the shop, and run a hose through the floor next to my main assembly table. To this I would attach a combination regulator/filter/oiler and a retractable hose. This is precisely what I did.

The air filter/oiler unit is a $20 special from Harbor Freight…well, I got it for $20. It was down to $15 last time I checked…sigh. Unfortunately it only occurred to me after I had purchased the filter unit that I don’t really want an oiler. While most of the time I’ll be using a nail gun, I do occasionally wish to use the air hose to blow off the shavings from a piece in progress and I doubt that misting it with tool oil would be very good for the finish. I’ve mounted the unit anyway and plan to keep the oiler empty. Perhaps someday I’ll move this device to another location on a separate hose and reserve it specifically for tool use. Or maybe not.

The hose reel was $30 for 20ft. It was the cheapest I’ve seen and while not as “industrial” as some of the more expensive units, I kinda preferred the compact size and appearance of this one. It also included a swivel mount. It works great right now…hopefully the mechanism will prove more reliable than the price would imply. We’ll see.

Automatic Drain Valve

Another Harbor Freight special. The plan was to locate the compressor in the crawl space, accessed via a trap door in the floor. Draining it regularly via the drain cock would be somewhat of a hassle. What I needed was an automatic drain. Thankfully I found this site in about 5 minutes of research pointing to a product from Harbor Freight. It was fairly straightforward to install — except that the inner diameter of the hose running from the unloader valve to the pressure switch on my compressor was too small for the included fittings. I ultimately wound up buying a different fitting which suffered from the same issue — but was setup in a such a way that I was able to coax the hose over the inner brass piece by applying a bit of heat. A bit of sanding of the outer tube was also required to get the connector attached to the tee. It was a bit of a chore, but ultimately I managed to get it all to work. And just like the author of the site above, my new drain cock valve was no good…so I also replaced it with a part from HD. The thing about the drain is that it only opens when the compressor starts and shuts off. So I can either leave the compressor on so that it “tops off” periodically (thereby activating the drain) or program the switch it’s on (see my other posts re: Insteon) to run it for a few minutes each day and give it a chance to drain any condensation.

Vertical Sheet-goods Pen

Finally, after filling the compressor, I used my new hose and old air nailers to build a 9′ tall x 30″ wide x 36″ deep vertical sheet goods pen just outside the shop door and install some cheap pre-primed moulding around the pen face and shop doors.

This is the start of my next big project: the Garage Remodel.