More shop work, going vertical to get more horizontal.

After getting the wood top bench project done last post, I kept the momentum rolling and ordered some more shop necessities. In a post a couple of months back I showed off my new shop. In the ensuing time, the shop got crowded as the family finished the unpacking and the shuffling around of all of our worldly possessions. The shop was functional, but not optimal. It was time to fix that.

Here is the shop as it stood before the work detailed in this post. A fairly standard two car garage with laundry hookups and the HVAC system. It comfortably fit both of the bikes, the race trailer and all of my tools and gear. It was functional the way it was the pic shows here. I just knew I could get more out of it with the right kind of touches. I need more workbench space to do bigger and better motorbike related projects. I looked all over brick and mortar stores and all throughout the internet for some solutions. I managed to find a shelf system that could hold 10,000 lbs. (yep, 5 tons) of stuff from Sam's Club for only $150 including free shipping. I snatched it up and set about to getting the space ready for it.

The beginning stages of garage Tetris commence. I moved all of my non-Motorbike junk out of the way and shifted my toolbox over to the other side of the garage. I loosely organized all of the stuff into piles that I thought could fit on the shelf unit and those that I knew wouldn't. In this exercise I noted that many of these bins were damaged and not filled to their optimum capacity. This just means I can use a little of my OCD into a future iteration of this project and go get new bins. Hopefully in the process I will recover even more floor space making the garage shop even better!

I hollowed out some space for the shelves and marked out the approximate footprint and height with some painters tape. I wanted to make sure my idea was going to work. Once I moved my stuff around I really got a good picture of how much floor space I could gain by using the unusable vertical space that exists in pockets around the shop. Things were looking up, literally. This is the spot where I used to have my workbench. It will work much better to house the shelf unit and get my stuff out of the way.

The pics above and below show the end result of all of this work and the benefits of the shelf unit. In the pic above I put a bunch of the stuff that I knew would be going onto the shelves into the empty space for the shelves. It is here that I began to question why I bought the shelves. It seems like the junk would be fine just piled along the wall. The pic below shows the real beauty of a sturdy set of shelves. I was able to pile my stuff twice as high with a great margin of safety. My oldest kid is always coming and going through the garage with her friends on bikes and scooters and other general 1st grader mayhem. Having a mountain of random life junk fall on top of her would be a bad way to end the weekend.

After getting the shelves set-up, which only took about 45 minutes, I loaded them up. I tried to organize things with an eye to what stuff needed to be accessed later. Over the next few days I tweaked it a bit more to allow me to pile more stuff on. The shelves took it all without complaint. I don't know if they really can take the 10,000 lbs. they say they are rated for, but they certainly accommodated my few hundred with ease. Later on I will be doing more organizing by going through the stuff I have to really see what is worthy of keeping. Along with getting more space for the bikes, I was also able to get some extra space to break out my heavy bag. Every now and then I like to relieve my frustrations by beating down an innocent nylon sack stuffed with sand.

While I was online spending money, I also added a workbench into my shopping kart. It took a bit longer to get here than the shelves, but it was worth it. I got it the day I finished editing this post. It didn't take me long to set it up so I made one more edit and put in this pic. While I was doing all of the other cleaning and rearranging, I carved out a space for a new workbench. Having the space ready from the start made setting it up and installing it so much easier. I might get some casters to raise the bench to the height of the tool box and to give me options in case I need to rearrange thing in the future.

Thanks for sticking with me during these boring shop posts. I know that watching someone play Tetris in the garage is not the most exciting content. Hopefully you picked up a thing or two about maximizing your available space. I took the Ninja to its first time out to Chuckwalla Valley Raceway for a Friday TrakDaz track day event yesterday. I'm tested out my new clip-ons combined with my raised rear set pegs at the fast, flowing track. I'm editing the post about the experience which will include some some video footage. Thanks for coming by and come back soon!

Blue