Eric’s Blog

A week or so ago, I decided to clean out the garage. We went through, figured out what needed to go to storage and what was going to stay. We put all the camping gear, sports equipment, and extra kitchen gadets into storage. I did some rearranging of the shelving units; putting one in the storage unit for additional vertical storage and then moving one from the other side of the garage to the other side so both were on the same side. The only thing I threw away was an old plastic cabinet that had some oil or paint leak in the bottom of it and make a mess. The shelves were sagging and it was just a storage locker for Fibber McGee. Fibber McGee is the guy who stores random crap in random places in our house. If you look around, Fibber McGee is probably storing things at your place too. Don’t let Fibber McGee win. Anyway, after that, I used the compressor to blow down the dust, leaves, cobwebs, and whatever else out the front of the garage door.

Now we were getting somewhere. I’ve had machinations on projects around the house for some time, but no work-shop in which to do them.

First things first, I needed a workspace that didn’t involve the floor of the garage in any way. It’s hard on the back, the knees, basically everything. I feel like every project I do, I wind up sitting on the floor at some point. I went online and found some plans for a work-bench that didn’t look too difficult or expensive and decided to go for it.

One of the most difficult things in collecting tools is that we live in the middle of nowheres-ville. It’s at least an hour to the nearest big-box store and as I’ve said in the past, I loathe Lowe’s.

I wound up spending a lot of money on Amazon and Harbor Freight, and I had to wait for of the tools to arrive, but now that I have them, my arsenel of tools and skills is growing.

All-in-all, the project wasn’t that difficult. I had the frame put together in an afternoon, Austin helped me with some of the bigger pieces by getting them home and holding them while I made the cuts. I put the upper and lower shelves on this morning and zipped them tight with screws and applied the first coat of polyeurethane to protect the top. When it’s dry, I’ll sand it down and put another coat on.

Austin and I even have a funny story because of the whole thing. Last night when he was helping me make the big cuts of MDF, a horse-fly flew into the garage and started biting us and terrorizing us; just as I was about to run the saw. I’m glad I hadn’t got started yet, because we went running for the door and with power tools running, it could have been dangerous.

I shut the garage door and Austin and I went all over the garage chasing this gigantic, biting fly like Walter White and Jesse in Breaking Bad.

Austin finally caught it and threw it in the trash after killing it. Maniacially laughing the whole time. Then, he almost undid every good thing he had done up to that point by trying to open the garage door again.

I won’t post the plans I used for the work table online because they’re not mine, but I will give kudos to the site where I got them. FixThisBuildThat has a ton of videos and how-to for aspiring DIY’ers. I actually like to say DITY because of the military, but hey, six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. He also has profiles on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. I highly recommend his easy to understand methods and plans. I even enjoy his meticulous method for laying out screws to the nearest 1/1000th of an inch because as he says, “engineering”. I even went so far as to purchase the whole work-shop set of plans from his site to keep me busy.

It’s like Anakin Skywalker says, life seems so much better when you’re fixing things.

I enjoy doing projects, I learned a few things along the way, and now I don’t have to work on the floor like I’m in circle-time. I’ve already got the lumber and plans for the next piece I’m going to make. I’ll get those pictures up when it’s done.