As I feared, I let time get away from me. Getting in to a good habit to blog regularly is something I struggle with. There’s a lot of catching up to do considering the tremendous amount of work I’ve done in the last two months. Here is where the garage rebuild was at at the beginning of June. We had painted the new drywall with a coat of primer and two of paint.
I then started to patch some cracks and spalling on the floor and ended up with over a week of extra work. I realized the new walls deserved a decent floor. This is how it looked after 8 bags of 50 lb concrete resurfacing mix. The most grueling part was getting on my hands and knees with a concrete rubbing brick to smooth the surface, which took the better part of a day. We then gave it a couple coats of concrete floor paint.
After the floor was finished I purchased some new cabinets and wall storage systems. Here’s how it was on July 13th:
A couple of days later I had Duraclean bring back all of the workbenches, tables, vacuums and standing power tools:
Most of the tools survived the smoke and subsequent cleaning, however I had to trash the small drill press seen in the front, as well as a mini metal lathe not seen here. All the power tools suffered some damage and need to be partially disassembled to clean off corrosion and rust.
I spent the next couple of weeks building, cleaning and organizing:
The next stage was when they brought back all the benchtop power tools, hand tools, hardware parts bins and many tool accessories. This is when I discovered the metal lathe was beyond my ability to repair:
I was able to get the replacement cost for this in the insurance settlement and purchased a new one.
The sheer amount of stuff I had was almost overwhelming. There was at least 30 boxes to be unpacked. At least 10% of the hand tools also needed rust and corrosion cleaned off and I had to toss hundreds of hardware parts (nuts, bolts, screws, etc.) which were too badly damaged. It was quite a slog, but after emptying one box after another I finally got through it all. Here’s how things looked a couple weeks ago:
I ended up purchasing a couple of new workbenches as well as a rack for clamp storage. The dust collector needed new bags and I had literally thousands of hardware items that were a jumbled mess and needed sorting.
Finally, last Friday I had them return all my wood. I had forgotten how much there was.
Last week I also received my new CNC machine:
It will be a few weeks before I am ready to assemble it. I need to build a new worktable first. There is still a lot of hardware to sort through, and almost every tool table has to be organized one at a time, but at least I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully I’ll be able to start making stuff again in a month or so.
Oh my dear friend, the work is back breaking! I know I have been absolutely nuts with mine, and I didn’t have to almost rebuild the building first! The sorting and finding a place for things can be mind numbing, but on the other hand, every now and then you run across something and say, “I had forgotten I bought that! Cool!” I do not envy you this task, but I am excited to see what wonderful things will be produced in your new area. For what it is worth, your friend in Belize is cheering you on and believes that it will be a better space then before and lead to many years of creativity!!!