setting up the Green Room part one

OK, so after I moved, setting up The Green Room wasn't exactly the top priority, but slowly it has been coming together. This is how it looked the day after the move:

The cabinets all down the side have been there a long time, and obviously pre-date the automatic garage door, but are otherwise all in great shape.

There were a couple of shelves that are probably surplus to my requirements, but otherwise it looks like being a great workshop.

I started by positioning and leveling my main work bench. I got the bench as close to level as I could using some shims I sliced off of a scrap 4x4.

Then I got underneath and secured the bench against the wall with some long screws; finding the first stud was a bit of trial and error, but find one, and you got 'em all.

With the bench secure, I cut some slightly oversize shims and smacked them in with a club hammer. This gives a very solid work surface, and I can hit the bench (or something on top of it) very hard without worrying about the consequences.

Onto the window. I wasn't particularly keen on having a huge window right above my bench, so I covered it over with an old sheet...but that wasn't ideal either....

The solution was to hang my peg board over the window....

Onto the second bench. Installing the drawers was the first step, and then the bench was leveled and secured in the way described above.

The slope on my garage floor is over two inches along the length of the benches:

Last thing was to put down the mats - I find it much more comfortable to stand on a mat rather than the concrete. These mats are ergonomically designed to reduce the stress on your joints that a day standing on concrete would normal cause...I'm old enough now that these things are starting to matter to me.

The Green Room

OK, so to start with here are a few shots of my new garage taken a few days before the move. I've gained the laundry (not good), but also gained a ton of storage space, cabinets, and shelves (very good). Also, I came up with an instant name for the new shop: The Green Room.

The layout of the cabinets means "bench goes here".

I rented a 17 foot truck from U-Haul and moved the shop myself. The UPS guy* helped my load the work benches into the truck, and I kind of pushed/pulled them out on my own at the other end. While he was helping me, I tried to talk the UPS guy into joining BAMA. I loaded all the rest of the boxes, tools, and car parts myself. I took my time as I had the truck all day.

garage nearly empty...apart from some car thing...

First in, last out: the benches were a good fit under my new built-ins!

This was after everything else got stacked up against the other wall....

...or dumped in the middle of the floor. Check back soon to see how the workshop gets set up.

(*Note: I get a LOT of stuff mail order/online so UPS are at my house most days and over time I got to know the usual delivery guy a little bit because he has a '67 Mustang undergoing an Eleanor conversion).

the best of the green room

A lot happened on this project in the year it was housed in The Green Room. Without question it was the most productive portion of the project so far, and that includes a four month period where hardly anything happened at all. Looking back at photographs of the project over this time really helped get my motivation to keep moving forward in the next few months.

setting up shop

The sharper eyed regular readers of this blog will have noticed one thing about my new garage: it's about a third of the size of the Green Room. This meant that once the car was rolled in, and the rest of my stuff piled around it, there wasn't really much room to do any work :( Add in the complications arising from moving house for the seventh time in the last eight years (!), and it's no surprise that several months elapsed with the following view pretty much intact:

I knew moving was going to slow down the project a LOT, and when I did finally get some free time, it was mostly devoted to making some extra space in the garage. I started by building a very strong and sturdy platform over the front of the car, which I can use for storage.

2"x4" joists supported  by a pair of 4"x6" posts

add closet doors

and start piling it up...

After a seriously long time spent shuffling boxes around in the dim glow from one light bulb, I had my workbench in place, some shelves on the wall, and a huge pile of boxes. It took the best part of three months to get this far, because I've been busy with other stuff.

Later in the story another platform got built at the back corner of the garage and I started getting stuff organized a little bit. The hardest part of this was trying to cut lumber on my miter saw without any space to work in.

Slowly the pile of boxes got smaller as stuff was unpacked, shuffled around or thrown out. I also sold off a lot of the excess furniture I've acquired over the last few years.

Really felt like I was getting somewhere when I had space to put some shelves up.

A few more weekends invested and this is pretty much how my new workshop will look for the rest of this garage. Now, back to the car....With a little bit of luck, 2013 will see the car running again! Happy New Year :)