Workbench Planning and Demo

Two posts in two days?! Don't get used to it!

While we're on the subject of the garage, I thought I'd share our next project. The garage had a small workbench, but it didn't have much in the way of storage and it was generally not that great. You can see it over in the corner under the pile of valuable stuff that was left here.

We spent an exciting Friday evening planning out how we wanted to build the new bench and designing it in AutoCad. Life as a homeowner is exciting!

We need to rent a truck to haul away the debris from the old workbench then buy materials for the new one. Yesterday we decided to spend the afternoon on the demolition portion of the project.

Prepare yourself for the cluttered horror that is our garage:

This is after 15 minutes of cleaning, too! Oh, and the contraption to the right is Devon's brew rig. You should help me peer pressure him into blogging about it.

Here's the old workbench after the junk has been cleaned up. Devon is considering mysteries of the universe.

We're going to build the new workbench out from the bare studs, so the awful wood paneling needed to go, for everybody's benefit. Underneath, we found this:

It's Stalwart Sheathing (also called Celotex, I believe), stapled together. There was some kind of masking tape on top of that. So, we decided that this stuff too must go, and started ripping. It all came down pretty easily, since it was held up by staples, small nails, and force of habit.

Inside the wall, we found treasures both living and dead! Living: some cool orange "organic growth". Dead: some kind of bug or bug shell.

We vacuumed up the dead bugs and carried on. The old workbench was surprisingly sturdy, but we won the battle. I think we're going to keep the top boards around for a later project - they're 2x10 redwood and just need to be trimmed and stripped.

Here's the corner where the workbench used to be. We're trying to pretend that that corner of the garage isn't visibly lower than the rest.

And the whole wall:

As you can see the inside face of the siding is water stained. Someone in the past ripped the building paper from between the studs. (Seriously, past home "improver"?) The REAL fix is probably to reside the house and do it right, but since that's not going to happen right now, we might just clean and paint and leave the siding/studs exposed. There's no requirement for sheathing on that wall, and no real need to insulate.

Stay tuned for another post about the fate of that wall and the new workbench!