Woodworking

Custom Storage And Desk: Part 2

Part 1 showed the cabinets going in. Once that was done, I added two sets of quad outlets above what will be the desk surface. Each quad outlet contains two outlets that are built-in surge protectors. This seemed useful for things like printers and scanners which will sit on the desk surface.

The length of the wall wasn’t an even multiple of the cabinet sizes I had available so I couldn’t stretch cabinets all the way to the end of the wall. Instead I wrapped some custom shelves around that corner. This is my least favorite part of the project, but they were cheap and functional. I can replace them later if I come up with something better. I bought some 10” metal supports and a couple melamine boards. I cut the boards to fit, ironed white veneer on the exposed ends and mounted them.

Next it was time for the hardest part of the job: building a desk surface. I went through a ton of different ideas from buying a bunch of boards to make a butcher block style table and using laminate flooring. This kept me up nights. I won’t go into details but there were a bunch of requirements that seemed to conflict. Finally I decided to build it with 3/4” sheets of oak plywood and face it with 1” strips of solid oak.

I had to build the desk in two parts in order to get it up the stairs into the room. One piece was an L-shape with a 45-degree angle where I’ll sit and the other wise was a simple 2’x8’ rectangle with a notch cut out of one corner to accommodate a support structure in the wall. I don’t have a table saw (yet) so all of the big cuts were done on the garage floor using a clamped straight edge to guide my circular saw. It’s not the most glamorous way to make cuts, but it sure works well even with one person. (The blue tarps were set up to cover my shelves and to block off the third bay where I was working in an effort to control dust.)

The building work went pretty quickly once I got started. The L-shape part was two pieces of plywood joined together with biscuits and glue. The facing went all the way around the desk and was also attached with biscuits and glue. There are no nails in the whole thing so the surfaces are pristine. I bought some 48” clamps and got good at using them as I slowly attached each piece of oak to face the plywood.

Once the building part was complete, I nervously set about staining the desk. It’s a huge surface and I’m no expert. A new 5” random orbital sander helped immensely as I got the surfaces prepped. I ran through 120 grit, 150 grit, and 220 grit sand paper. I figured I needed to do each piece in one pass so that the stain would be put on roughly even. I started by doing the bottoms of both pieces, made my mistakes there and then did the tops. After the stain I applied three coats of polyurethane (the bottom only got one coat.) Given the cool weather, I wanted to let everything dry extra long so I did one coat per day. That stretched the project out a long time, but in the end, I had a desk surface that I was pretty proud of.

Next up: Installation and finishing touches

benmartens October 28, 2013 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Custom Storage And Desk: Part 1

The only want I’m able to distract people from the pile of boxes and junk along the wall in the man cave is with a 110” screen. On that same wall, I also had a tiny little cheap desk and chair setup that have been progressively getting worse and worse over the years. I had grand visions for what that area of the room could be, and after completing a bunch of other home projects, it was time to tackle this one.

My first decision was whether to do this myself or contract it out. To get a rough idea of material costs, I did a drawing in Google Sketchup using the dimensions of Ikea cabinets. I then got a bid from a contractor for one of these online cabinet places. The contractor’s design was definitely nicer than what I drew, but it was about 2.5 times the cost. While getting that bid might feel like a waste of time, it helped me a lot throughout the project because I knew how much money I was saving.

The cabinets were the first big steps in the project after the planning was done. They were quick to assemble and very easy to hang even with only one person. The design of the cabinets is really intelligent and allows me to easily swap shelves for drawers or vice versa if I ever want to later. I could also upgrade the cabinet facing without too much cost. I still need to pick out door pulls and cabinet handles but I’ll probably do that at the end.

Next up: shelving along the left side of the cabinets and a desk surface.

benmartens October 21, 2013 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Center Channel Speaker Mount

My center channel speaker doesn’t have a place to accept a wall mount on the back of it. I originally tried using a couple 6” shelf brackets to support the speaker, but it didn’t look great, especially when compared to the other speaker mounts.

After some thought I ended up building a small half box out of 1/4” MDF. The construction was pretty simple and then I finished it off with flat black spray paint to match the speaker. The end result is that don’t really notice the box around the speaker and it looks great!

In the photo below you can see the undried fill holes from the old shelf brackets. They stuck down pretty far below the speaker.

benmartens March 20, 2012 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Garage Shelves: Part 3

After the success of the shelves and the workbench, I decided to build some shelves and a coat rack by the door. For those of you keeping track at home, this is day four of the garage project.

Instead of designing them myself, I used some plans that I found online. I’ll spare you the details since you can read the plans, but here are before and after shots.

While the plans look nice, I can’t recommend that you build these shelves. They took FOREVER and it was very difficult to mount them to a finished wall. I had to be super careful to make sure the lag bolts went into the studs behind the wall. If I missed, the shelves would end up on top of Tyla’s car.

The horizontal 2x4s look goofy. I added them because the center vertical 2×4 doesn’t tie into any wall studs. It’s there for vertical support only. The horizontal 2x4s are screwed into it and then screwed into the wall studs. Also, that was about the only way I could hold the shelves up and screw them in myself. If I had it to do over, I think I would place 2x4s horizontally across the wall and then build shelves onto those. But I guess once I have some boxes on the shelves, I won’t see that anyway.

The coat rack is made from a bathroom shower rod and some eye hooks. We have coat closets inside, but this will be a good spot to hang motorcycle gear and wet clothes.

I think this will be the end of the garage updates for a while.

[UPDATE] Since I wrote this and took the photo, I have removed the bottom shelf. Our garage door openers don’t have working lights (they’re OLD!) so a motion detector by the door is our only hope of getting some light when we drive in and step out of the car. The bottom shelf blocked the motion detector’s sensing range. I’m not very proud of these shelves. They’re functional but I know I can do better. You might hear more about this some day.

benmartens January 11, 2012 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Garage Shelves: Part 2

The next phase of the garage shelf project was building a workbench. Here’s a shot of the old bench.

It’s not quite the dream work area that I had in mind. The day after I built the storage shelves, I set to work building a new workbench. The shelves had been thoroughly planned out, but the workbench was designed as it was built. I decided to have the bench be roughly 38” tall. As with the shelves, I had to factor in the slope of the floor out to the driveway. Here is a shot of the frame. Some of the posts rest on the foundation. It bolts to the wall for rigidity, but I don’t rely on any of the wall joists for actual support.

Next it was time to apply the work surface. I went with one layer of 3/4” plywood and a top layer of 3/4” MDF drilled in from the bottom. Some day I’ll probably replace the MDF with a more durable surface, but for now it makes a very smooth work area.

I don’t have a table saw, but the method pictured below worked very well for making large cuts.

Once I got the plywood on, I realized that I didn’t have a good place for some black metal shelves that I had in the garage. I bit the bullet and cut a few inches off the end of my brand new workbench and remounted the legs. I wish I had thought of it originally but it turned out ok.

That’s as far as I got on that day. The next day, I spent a few hours adding a rail and shelf along the edge of the bench. The base of the shelf is a 2×4 and then the shelf is 3/4” MDF with cutouts for each wall joist.

On the second day of the workbench project, Logan also came over to help me put some plywood up in the rafters. It was pretty tricky and a bit time-consuming because all of the wires are run on top of the rafters. Not only was it hard to get the boards up through gaps in the wires and rafters, but I also had to lay down 2x4s on the rafters to give the wires room to go underneath the plywood. We added about 80 square feet of storage space up there.

benmartens January 10, 2012 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Garage Shelves: Part 1

The shelves that Tim and I built in the condo were one of the best changes I made to that place. The garage in the new house is awesome, but I wasn’t real happy with the aesthetics or functionality of the old shelves and the workbench area. I’ll break this into a series of posts because it was a pretty big project.

Here’s what it looked like before I started. (That’s Logan’s truck in the photo.)

Functional? Probably, but I knew I could do better. Logan and I started by tearing out all the old shelves. The metal went to recycling where we made about $35. That covered the dump run for the rest of the stuff that couldn’t go to recycling.

Getting all the wood and cleaning out the old mess took a day. The next day I tackled the main shelves. Because of the electrical box and the plumbing (just to the left of this photo), I decided not to run them along the whole wall. I started by building the shelves on the floor. I used the existing wall studs as the support for the back side of the shelves and that saved a lot of time. I had to make each post a different length because the garage floor slopes slightly out to the driveway.

I was able to lift the shelves up into place and secure them to the wall.

Then I added some plywood for the shelves. Each piece was 2’x4’ so when I was at Home Depot, I had them cut the plywood for me. That saved a lot of time and made it easier to handle. All I had to do at home was notch out holes for the 4×4 supports.

By the end of the day I had a good looking set of shelves in place!

benmartens January 9, 2012 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Garage Shelves: Part Deux

Ever since I did the first set of garage shelves, I’ve wanted to extend them. Tim came over and we were able to do just that.

We tripled the previous surface area and even added a ladder to make it a bit easier to get up there. The end result is enormous, but it really provides a lot of storage area for my little condo. I had a couple neighbors jealously look on and ask if I’d come do the same in their garage.

Thanks for the help Tim! I’d probably still be making trips to Home Depot for replacement pieces of wood if you weren’t there to help.

It’s a bit difficult to photograph the shelves, but this should give you an idea. There is about 90 square feet of space on top. I had to put a lot of stuff on the floor while I was building the new shelves and I clearly have cleanup work remaining.

benmartens September 14, 2009 Projects, Woodworking

Garage Shelf

One of the biggest (by physical size) projects that I’ve ever undertaken also turned out to be one of the quickest. I have a very tiny garage. It was a struggle just to get the motorcycle and the car in at the same time. Over the last two years, the floor of the garage and the three shelves got more and more full. It was time to build a bigger shelf/mini-attic at the back of the garage above the motorcycle. The only trick is that we had to build around the water heater and pipes in the corner.

Tim and I met at Home Depot at 5:45 on Monday evening. We headed home with the wood and soon BenH joined us. Ben and I built the frame while Tim notched the top of each post. The posts were 4×4’s and the 2×4 (and 2×8 front span) sit in notches on top of the posts for added strength. Just four hours after we started the project, we had the frame standing up on the posts and lightly secured.

On Tuesday night, we added some diagonal bracing and secured everything tightly. Screws were added between the structure and wall studs were we could to keep it all stable. For the final step, we cut the plywood to fit the top of the shelf and Tim screwed it into the frame.

Pretty much everything that we had on the floor of the garage now fits up on that shelf. We were even able to empty one of the white shelves. I’m probably going to be buying a cargo box for the top of my car and we should be able to hang it from the bottom of the shelf when not in use. We have just about crammed as much fun into the garage as we can physically fit!

We had about $20 worth of wood leftover due to some last minute design changes. Once I return that, the total project cost will only be about $80. We also learned that Stanley bits are worthless. We ruined about a half dozen of them trying to get all the screws in. Once we switched to DeWalt bits, everything went much more smoothly.