Nice and clean in the good old days:
The center of my garage is useable space, since I only park one car in there. When I built my 'Compliance Station' a couple of months back, I also added a new cabinet to the center. It looked like this.
It's a heavy-duty cabinet that stores a lot of stuff. I like the fact that the doors have their own shelves in them for smaller stuff. It's made of very solid 14-gauge steel.
It's big, though. Really big. And it started to bother me that it ate up so much space right in the center of the garage.
So I got an idea. And last week I picked up a piece of 72.5"x39"x1.5" birch butcher block and decided I'd do a little surgery on the cabinet to turn it into something that would have a function as a work surface as well as storage, and also wouldn't block my view of my car.
I'm in the middle of two other projects, so I basically had an afternoon to do this. So it was not elegantly done.
Here's the cabinet marked with the 'belt' section I decided to cut out.
I used a circular saw with a Freud Diablo metal-cutting blade to chop through the 14 gauge sheet metal. Quick and quiet enough that I didn't wake the baby from his nap.
Here you can see the carcass of the cabinet itself with the middle section gone. It's now only 35" tall.
Cutting out the middle piece meant the hinges would still work the same and I wouldn't have to bend any sheet metal. I had flux core wire in the welder, and -- even though I used a grinder to get down to bare metal -- the paint around the weld would catch on fire. It wasn't pretty.
But I planned on covering up the scar in any case. Here's a picture with the butcher block on top and a wood kick panel added around the base.
It's at the same height as all the other benches in the garage, so even if I'm working on a 20' length of something, I can just span between the benches.
Handles and lighting will come later. I'll clean the place up when I'm done with the other two woodworking projects, and get a better picture. But it's already nice having the extra space to spread out. (Full disclosure: I'm a work bench junky; I've got one more butcher-block bench -- height adjustable -- in the planning stages.)
The center of my garage is useable space, since I only park one car in there. When I built my 'Compliance Station' a couple of months back, I also added a new cabinet to the center. It looked like this.
It's a heavy-duty cabinet that stores a lot of stuff. I like the fact that the doors have their own shelves in them for smaller stuff. It's made of very solid 14-gauge steel.
It's big, though. Really big. And it started to bother me that it ate up so much space right in the center of the garage.
So I got an idea. And last week I picked up a piece of 72.5"x39"x1.5" birch butcher block and decided I'd do a little surgery on the cabinet to turn it into something that would have a function as a work surface as well as storage, and also wouldn't block my view of my car.
I'm in the middle of two other projects, so I basically had an afternoon to do this. So it was not elegantly done.
Here's the cabinet marked with the 'belt' section I decided to cut out.
I used a circular saw with a Freud Diablo metal-cutting blade to chop through the 14 gauge sheet metal. Quick and quiet enough that I didn't wake the baby from his nap.
Here you can see the carcass of the cabinet itself with the middle section gone. It's now only 35" tall.
Cutting out the middle piece meant the hinges would still work the same and I wouldn't have to bend any sheet metal. I had flux core wire in the welder, and -- even though I used a grinder to get down to bare metal -- the paint around the weld would catch on fire. It wasn't pretty.
But I planned on covering up the scar in any case. Here's a picture with the butcher block on top and a wood kick panel added around the base.
It's at the same height as all the other benches in the garage, so even if I'm working on a 20' length of something, I can just span between the benches.
Handles and lighting will come later. I'll clean the place up when I'm done with the other two woodworking projects, and get a better picture. But it's already nice having the extra space to spread out. (Full disclosure: I'm a work bench junky; I've got one more butcher-block bench -- height adjustable -- in the planning stages.)
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