Okay, it’s not really a “shop”. It’s really just my garage. But then again, it’s hardly ever had a car in it in the last two decades, so calling it a garage is perhaps even a bit more of a stretch. But I’m trying to convert it into a place where I don’t mind spending time and have the tools and space necessary to accomplish some kinds of “making” that I haven’t done before and which can’t really be done inside the house proper.

Carmen and I began the day out back with a simple chore: laying down landscaping cloth and mulch in the small flower bed just in front of our retaining wall. For those of you who weren’t talking to me during the incredibly annoying construction process that was the retaining wall, I had the old rotting redwood retaining wall replaced with a properly engineered concrete retaining wall, with new drainage. While we were at it, we started on “zero-scaping” the backyeard, which in the area of our patio mostly meant replacing it with gravel and even more changes to the drainage. That process ultimately was good, but it was mentally exhausting, and we haven’t really done much with the space since last year. As the result, we got a fair amount of weeds and the like growing up through the gravel. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve tidied that up and sprayed, and got the grass that grows up on our hills trimmed back to comply with fire regulations.

But it’s about time that we got some low improvements going. Over the last week or so, we’ve pressure washed the (rather ugly) concrete patio so it is at least cleaner, and we thought that we should fill the bed which sits in front of the flower bed with some groundscaping cloth and mulch.

When we began this morning, we had this:

And with an hour or so of work, we transitioned into this.

I tilled the area a small bit (mostly in the corner) and raked the debris out and generally cleaned up the ground, and then laid down a roll of cloth and piled out six bags of new mulch. It still needs a lot of work, but it was what I had planned for the day, so I can’t really be unhappy with it.

Then, off to the shop! Carmen had done a fair amount of cleaning herself yesterday, so we had some more square footage to move around in. We are getting to the point where organizing the four 36″ x 24″ plastic shelving units on one side of the shop has risen in my priorities. They are big, and seem to collect an annoying level of junk, none of which is easy to organize or clean because out of necessity, they are too close to one another. But a few weeks ago, I saw this workspace hack done by Fran Blanche:

She basically took a simple mover’s dolly which you can get pretty inexpensively from Harbor Freight, and adapted it to mount underneath the shelving unit that she had. I thought this was a cool idea. But the shelving units that I’m using are a bit bigger than hers. The larger dolly from Harbor Freight is 30″x18″, and my shelves are 36″x24″, which means I’d have to split it along both dimensions. That doesn’t seem right. In pondering it, I have a new solution. It involves just 2 pieces of 2×4 and four inexpensive casters, and I’ll be writing that up when I test out the idea.

But I did have one smaller metal shelving unit which we 12″x30″, and I thought it would be possible to adapt it with just a couple of 2×4 additions. So, I gave it a whirl, and it worked great.

This shelving unit used to sit next to my drill press and gathered all sorts of junk. But now I can easily move it around, or spin it either to sit flush against the wall, or perpendicular to it. I can even roll it across the garage, load stuff onto it or off of it, and then roll it back. Nice! I think that when my other shelving units are on wheels, I’ll really enjoy them as well.

That’s my weekend so far. I might spend some time working on Carmen’s potting bench tonight, which will be great to put behind me so I can then work on a better stand for the drill press.

Have a good one!