Well, the last project update was for kid stuff. This one is for the other stuff I have built since we moved into the new place. Here goes...
This is the third corkboard I have built using real wine corks collected from family, friends, and taken from our own personal stash. The first I made a puzzle out of and is hanging in the kitchen. The second was a half-corkboard, half-chalkboard I made for a friend for a Christmas gift.
The most recent one hangs in my wife's office. A very long time ago Agmorion gave me a frame building jig which I never used until I did this project. My reluctance was mainly due to laziness and fear of the unknown. It is a great little tool. It was easy to set up and it aligned the corners of the frame perfectly. I will be using it a lot in the future.
As with the other corkboards I made this one out of mainly reclaimed materials. The cedar frame was made from leftover wood from a mailbox project. The backing was made from spare pegboard leftover from the garage refurbishment. It is 19 inches wide, 30 inches tall, and has 280 natural corks. The wife loves it.
I made this chalkboard from cedar recovered from my son's playset at the old place from the useless (to a two-year-old) monkey bar part of the structure. The oak backing was made from leftover paneling from a cap I made for our entertainment center. The writing surface is Valspar 203261 Black chalkboard paint. That stuff is like magic. The end product is 22 inches wide by 37 inches high and hangs in my garage/shop.
When we moved out of the old place, all of my workbenches, shelving, and even a huge roll-around cabinet I made (actually, Jimmydunes helped me build one of the old workbenches and the wife helped me with another...) conveyed with the place, as did the shed out back. Not only did the new place not have an out-of-the-way place for garden tools, etc, the new place had no workbenches.
Obviously things were extremely tight in the garage for a while. The first order of business was to catalog and dispose of all the old paint in the new garage. Some of that stuff was eight years old. I'm glad I took the time to record the old paints - that list came in handy when the contractors came by to fix stuff caught during the inspection. Next came moving some of the larger stuff like wire shelving, the wood holder, the tool chest, and the table saw into their final homes.
Finally it was time to put in some benches. I wanted them to be nicer looking than the old ones and I really had a lot of things on my plate so I figured I would just buy some this time. I found out that for the size that I wanted I would have ended up paying between $250 and $300 per bench! No way. Plus, each one would need to be custom anyway to get the maximum usage from my limited space.
Time to build.
The first one (the one on the right) needed to be tall to allow for adequate storage of larger things and to later have a shelf for smaller tools like Skil-Saws and cordless drills. The top (like all the other benches) is made from a paint-grade pine panel 2 feet wide and 6 feet long. The legs and cross members are spruce 2x4s and the shelving is just low grade yellow pine board. The bench is 46" high, which is a good height for me for using the drill press.
The second one (middle) is basically a carbon copy of the first, except ten niches shorter and with an integrated power strip on the front. The third one (there on the left) is basically a carbon copy of the second except it is four feet long, has casters, pegboard sides and back, and has doors made from the same material as the top. I use it to store all of my electronics parts and other stuff I don't feel like looking at.
Each of the benches cost less than $100 in materials and all three took about eight hours total to build. Well worth the effort.
All my yard tools now hang on the wall, as does some pegboard, the ladders, and additional shelving so my once extremely cluttered new garage has nearly been transformed into a borderline respectable shop. The only thing left to do now is build a large cedar toy chest for storing all of our son's outdoor toys and park it in an area I have picked out off the back porch and I think I will have maximized the space.
The next tasks I want to tackle out there is to add more lighting and to seal the floor, but those things will need to wait for spring. In the meantime it seems I have a display case and another chalkboard to build...
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