Precious Precious Garage Real Estate

A lot of you guys and gals out there are fortunate enough to have big shops to store your toys in, or at least a 3+ car garage.  One day I will get to that level, hopefully sooner rather than later, but until then I am your Average Joe who participates in the shuffle and puzzle that many refer to as the standard two car garage.  Oh, and to complicate my situation further, I share half of it with my wife!  On the other side of the spectrum, I’m certainly not trying to rub in all of my garage space to those who are working with less than I am.  In fact, if you are managing to make due with a single car or even no garage, kudos to you because that is impressive and next to impossible in my book.

Now let me be clear, a garage to me is a place to park vehicles and is a space for building and working on things.  It is NOT a place to store boxes of crap you’re never going to look at again yet hold onto because you pretend to have grown up in the Great Depression and therefore hold on to every piece of trash that finds its way into your possession.

I recently found myself with some spare time in the afternoons and on weekends with the world all but shutting down, and figured it would be a perfect time to go through the “shop” and make more efficient use of the space I do have.  This is an ongoing task as I’m never quite pleased with how I have things laid out; but the spring cleaning, organizing, and trashing things was starting to become a dire necessity.  It also didn’t help that I started accumulating more and more tools during the pandemic, but for one reason or another I acquired lots of new things to build and play with and they all need their home within the space.  I hate having things sitting all over with no form of organization.

My first order of business was arranging the work benches so that I could still easily pull the bikes in and out and also get to the door leading to my side yard.  Since I’m only working with two benches, and how the layout of my garage is there is really only one good way to position these due to their sizes, so they were left alone after hemming and hawing for a while.  It doesn’t help that one of these work benches is a 4’x8′ welding table.  Go big or go home I guess.  Also, just for fun while everything was away from the outside wall I took the opportunity to put up some insulation since that was the only space without in there.  The tables then went back in their designated areas after the insulation was up, and with those in place I could then arrange the smaller items on top of and around them.

I have some bigger tools that have a pretty big footprint, but with some [relatively] expensive stands for the table saw and miter saw I was able to fit both into the same amount of space as one consumed before. #winning.  But even more importantly I was able to put both of those at the end of the massive welding table with the small air compressor and was able to fit both bikes side by side in the remaining space where I can pull out whichever I want without having to shuffle things around.  #stillwinning.

A while back I had put up some old kitchen cabinets above my smaller wood bench…which I then overloaded pretty good and eventually they fell.  Luckily they didn’t damage anything, but I guess that’s what I get for not pulling them down right when I saw them begin to fall apart.  I sure would like some newer, not garbage cabinets up in that space to get all of my oils, rattle cans, etc. off of my other shelving and out of the way.  Other than those things previously housed in the cabinets now temporarily taking up shelving space I also reorganized all of said shelves and created a ton more room for even more future shit to store.

As you may have seen on the insta I was able to bring home a very nice plasma cutter for a good price, so I guess I need to find a home for that bad boy…oh and upgrade my air compressor because why not, right?

I’m quite fortunate to have enough side yard next to my current garage where I can build another garage/shop – hell I could even put in another 16′ door if I wanted and still be within the confines of the building department’s laws regarding how far structures need to be from the property line.  I’m confident my wife is tired of me talking about building the new shop because realistically it’s not going to happen anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to think about it…constantly.  And then when the funds show up some years down the road I might actually have some sort of idea of what to build.  Maybe.

I have heard that when you add more space you equally add more crap to fill it, so I’m looking forward to the future trash that I bring home!  But for the time being I’ll try not to be too ungrateful for the space that I do have and continue to hone the organization within to minimize the work associated with the puzzle that is known as my shop.