Building Project: Pull out shelves for shop storage

April 5, 2024

When you have a shop in a relatively small basement storage space is at a premium. I’m constantly looking for ways to add more storage or in this case make the storage I have more usable. The top shelf in the storage behind the basement stairs has been an evolution from open shelves to a set of flat deep drawers and now to make the top shelf more effective pull out shelf organizers. The problem was that if anything went to the back of this 24 inch deep shelf it would be very hard to access. I saw a great deal on Amazon for Blum TANDEM under-mount slides and I’d been watching someone on YouTube making pull out shelves for a kitchen pantry and this gave me the idea to make a bunch of pull out shelves for the shop.

Three of the units are six inches wide and two are nine inches wide. The front three are 18 inches tall and the back two are 15 inches and 14 inches tall respectively. They are all 21 inches deep. The end panels are 3/4 inch natural birch plywood and the top, bottom and shelves are 1/2 inch natural birch plywood. The rails to keep stuff from coming off the shelves are 1/4” natural birch plywood.

The construction is just rabbets top and bottom and dados to support the shelves. I used glue and 15 gauge finish nails ( I love my Milwaukee cordless 15 gauge finish nailer, it is fantastic ). The back of each cabinet is nailed and glued on.

The TANDEM under-mount slides are pretty easy to work with except for one tiny oversight on my part, there is a minimum drawer width because the levers and mechanism to connect the cabinet to the rails have a fixed width and I was just under it with the six inch wide cabinets. I was able to work around it by modifying the bottom of the six inch cabinets so it all worked out.

I also had to reduce the height of the furthest back cabinet because the spacing between units wasn’t as tight as I’d estimated. I was able to just slice the top off of the unit and make it into an open topped roll-out, just like I had designed it that way to clear the pipe going over it.

All in all they work great, pull out smoothly, soft close, clear everything around them and have made that space very usable. I even have some “baby fat” as Adam Savage calls it, extra storage that is empty. That won’t last long.

Building Project: Adding work space to the shop

December 18, 2023

My shop where I build things is located in my basement and is connected to my garage which is also under the house. It isn’t very big so I’m always looking for ways to get more room for projects and machines. Recently I was told that my 40+ year old oil powered steam boiler was on it’s way out and that I’d have to replace it. I realized that I could solve this problem and reclaim almost 20 square feet of floor space where my oil tank was located if I converted to gas.

Oil tank on top of platform, under platform is a coal pile from 1929…

So, after a long period of dances with electricians, plumbers, removal people, inspectors etc… I have a new gas powered steam boiler ( No really, I wasn’t going to rip out all of the steam pipes and radiators in my 1929 house, I don’t care… ) and unfortunately under the platform and the coal pile was a granite outcropping like others at the back of my basement. If I wanted a flat floor for a work surface I’d have to reduce the outcropping to at least floor level.

I thought “How hard can it be?” and went out and got a hammer drill, a carbide drill bit, a set of feathers and wedges and set about splitting the outcropping into pieces.

Hammer drill...

Granite removal in progress...

Pile of granite chunks in back yard...

This went well for a while, but it is very hard work. I could only do so much and then I’d have to take a break for a while to keep from hurting myself. Then I ran into a very hard section of the granite that just wouldn’t split. I would tap in the wedges and it wouldn’t crack, the wedges would get stuck and I would end up having to drill the wedges out.

I shifted to “Plan B” which was to score the area at about two inch intervals with a diamond wheel and then use a carbide chisel and sledge hammer to snap off pieces. This made the feather and wedges process seem like the easiest thing in the world. I quickly realized that it would also take forever since I was only getting about a 1/2” thickness of rock removed per round of chipping and I couldn’t even manage to do the whole area at once.

Then I thought perhaps I can just pour concrete in the area that I have cleared and then work on the remaining area in the fullness of time while still getting some floor space. I used multiple online concrete calculators to figure out how much I would need and quickly realized that just mixing that amount of concrete let alone wrangling that number of 50 lb bags would kill me.

“Plan C” rapidly emerged. I called up the masons who had helped me with our new retaining walls and garden landscaping. We came to an agreement on price and in two days they had removed the remaining granite outcropping and poured a new floor section.

Rock removed by professionals and new floor poured…

With the new floor in place I wasted no time in starting to build out the new area. I had thought about the layout many times and I drew up some rough scale drawings to make a material estimate and ordered everything to be delivered from Home Depot. In the meantime I painted the walls with two coats of basement paint.

My plan was to have lower cabinets and work surfaces running into the corner with drawer units and shelf units all painted, with doors, drawer fronts, and cabinet backs to control dust and mildew. There would also be three upper cabinets of similar construction for more shelf storage.

The first step was to screw pressure treated battens to the wall to support the lower and upper cabinets.

Pressure treated battens to support work surfaces screwed to concrete using Tapcon screws…

I then built a 2x4 frame, yes I had considered doing frameless cabinets but I wanted the extra strength to possibly support machines, hammering etc… It also made all of the cabinets modular so if I wanted to move or replace one in the future I could just unscrew it and pop it out of the frame later on.

2x4 frame, yes yes I know it’s unnecessary…

I cut the counter tops out of 23/32” cheap shit sheathing plywood ( which I’m going to top with hardboard later in this story ) and built the boxes, drawers, and shelves out of the same material.

Cabinet boxes 23/32” sides and 1/4” backs… shelf boxes drilled for adjustable shelf pins…

I got a good deal on some cheap drawer slides on Amazon and built and installed all the drawer units with drawer fronts, handles etc… You’ll also note that I’m painting (badly) everything with Zinzer primer to help prevent mildew ( my basement is damp ).

Next was lots of doors, I used simple half-lap joints and some 1” ( really 3/4”) select pine for the frames and 1/4” plywood for the panels. I was able to mass produce the parts since all the uppers were the same doors and the lowers were all the same height.

Doors installed for all of the upper and lower cabinets…

Finally, I built a rolling island with a work surface and storage inside. I found these cool ratcheting leveling casters that have rubber feet that come down and lift up the leg to make the island stationary and it also lets it be leveled pretty accurately.

Rolling leveling work table island with storage…

I’m so excited to have this new workspace finally and I’ve already started building a project with it.

Addendum: A hero tool

I meant to mention a new tool that I got for this project. I knew that I was going to be cutting up a lot of 23/32” ( close to 3/4” ) plywood and other sheet goods for this project. I’ve always been unhappy with clamping straight edges, boards, etc… and trying to follow along them with the circular saw. I watched with jealousy makers on YouTube using lovely Festool Track Saws and doing effortless long cuts. I couldn’t bring myself to part with the money for a track saw. However I found a compromise that only cost a hundred bucks. The Milescraft Track Saw Guide which is an adapter that converts almost any 7.5” circular saw into a track saw. It comes with tracks, clamps, the adapter sled and alignment accessories. I can only say that it works perfectly. It doesn’t do a couple of things that a real track saw can do like plunge cutting and pre-cutting the kerf in front of the saw. I don’t actually need those things, it does everything else. I cut up many sheets of various thickness material quickly and accurately using my 20 year old Porter Cable circular saw and this adapter. Highly recommended.

Building Project: Outdoor storage, Wood organization

October 12, 2023

Part of my home shop is located in my garage. I still park my car in the garage, so things get set up in there and then put away after a project. There is also a lot of storage for outdoor tools most importantly my long ladder for getting to the second story of my house on the rare occasions I am required to. My stock of wood was also stored there on the top shelf behind the ladder in a very inconvenient pile. Most of the time I have to essentially take all of it out to get to the wood I want and then put it all back. This time I decided to fix this problem. For reference here is a before picture:

In order to fix this problem I needed to find a place to put the ladder. After walking around my house multiple times I realized that there was a huge space under my front porch that would store the ladder just fine. I fortunately had some scraps of the Azec trim from when it was built so I could just cut out a section of lattice and turn that into a door with some 1x4 stock as the frame and a 2x4 backer for the door jamb with some trim. It was a little weird because the bottom of the porch side follows the grade so the door is a parallelogram not a square or rectangle. I managed to get it roughly the right shape and then I trimmed the whole door on the table saw to fit.

Now that I could stash the ladder in there I could cut off the uprights that the ladder had hung off of giving me unobstructed access to the top shelf. On the right side I installed a Rockler 4-tier Wood Rack which was easy to just screw onto the existing 2x4 supports. I put the “nice” wood, the maple, walnut and cedar on that rack. Then on the other side of the window (which you will now be able to see and the shop will get natural light too…) I built a 24” deep, 48” long, 31” high wood sorter with dividers every 6.5”. It is just quickly screwed together out of scrap wood that I had and some 2x4’s. The hardest part was getting it from the floor up to the shelf… it is firmly screwed to the shelf. Then I could sort my smaller wood off-cuts by size and quality and access any of them without moving anything.

I also moved some other things that could live outside to the new storage. Here’s what the new arrangement looks like:

There’s more cleaning up of the other shelves to come but the wood situation is solved.

Building Project: Improving shop storage...

October 2, 2022

One of the first projects I did after I retired was to replace an old broken down bench with large shelves for storage. It was a good improvement to the shop and did fine service for the last couple of years. However, in two years I’ve acquired more tools and as I filled up that shelf I realized that it was messy and inefficient for getting to things without having to move everything else. Then I was watching an Adam Savage YouTube video of one of his one-day builds to make Flat File Tool Storage and I saw the solution to both problems. Additionally I realized that much of the stock for the project could come from my off cut pile, which needed cleaning out in any case.

The space I had available in the middle shelf next to my bench was 45” x 24” x 13” this included clearance to have the drawers come out and not run into things on the pegboard on one side and to not interfere with my clamp storage on the other side. I decided to split the space down the middle and make five two inch drawers on the left and three three and a half inch drawers on the right. Originally they were going to be all the same width but due to a mistake I made while routing a dado in the top and bottom ( which it turns out I didn’t need anyway ) I ended up making the three and a half inch drawers a little narrower.

I wrestled with going out and buying a compressor and a brad nail gun to assemble the sides and drawers like Adam Savage does ( I often joke to myself that his projects are 80% brads by the end… ) But, for good or ill I just decided to use some short wood screws, a rabbet on the front and rear panels, and glue to hold stuff in place. The looks didn’t really matter to me for something that was going to be in the shop.

I did get slightly fancy and put on drawer fronts and trim around the installation both for looks and to help reduce the sawdust that could get in on the tools and drawer slides. I also broke down and labeled all the drawers in the shop (and even some bins) to help remind me where things lived.

I used the drawer installation method that I’ve seen Jimmy Diresta do and which I’m sure many others have done where you screw the slides to the drawer and then you line everything up in the opening and slide the drawer forward on some spacer/support sticks and screw in the slides. It definitely works great for getting them aligned nicely and for stacks of drawers where you want nice tight consistent spacing.

After it was installed it triggered a review of where all my tools were stored and a bunch of sorting and culling which was also good for the shop. I got rid of a bunch of broken stuff that I had to finally admit I wasn’t going to fix/adapt/use in any reasonable future. It also flattened out the retrieval for a lot of tools making them more usable because I wasn’t meeting the resistance of having to claw through a pile to get to them.

I’m really happy with how this came out and it is a big upgrade for the quality of life in my shop!

Building Project: Shop Expansion

June 28, 2021

As I mentioned in my previous post I have a furniture project coming up to build a custom convertible sofa bed for our library/guest room. Before that I needed to add some new tools to my shop and give them someplace to live. One important feature is a sliding compound power miter saw station where the front of the bench provides the infeed/outfeed support for the miter saw. The bench will also have a ruler and an adjustable stop for the infeed of the miter saw. Because I was going to build new benches and such I also decided to add more storage. The storage is drawers, shelves, and pegboard to give everything I have a place to live, plus some extra capacity. I’ve never built or installed drawers before so this was also a skills upgrade. See the design drawing below for an idea of what I was shooting for…

Side, top, and front views of new bench design…

The first challenge was ordering all the stock and hardware for the new bench. I had two problems with my order. One was self-inflicted, I ordered the wrong length 2x4s due to clicking on an adjacent item in the online ordering system. The second one was the store’s problem, they omitted half my plywood and that was after a one day delay. The good news is that now I can go in person to the store and so I went and picked up the missing plywood and a bunch of additional 2x4s.

I set up a temporary miter saw station and my new table saw in the garage which is attached to the shop. This is probably where the table saw will always be used just for space reasons. I got a folding and roll away table saw so it can be out of the way when I’m not using it. Also, the car needs to go in the garage most of the time.

Temporary miter station and table saw station in the garage

The first part of the build was to build the frame of the bench. I actually built it as three independent units and then connected them. Note the lowered section in the middle to allow the deck of the miter saw to line up with the surface of the bench. The miter saw made all the repeated cuts so easy and quick. Also it makes perfect consistent square cuts where I would probably have some “variation” using a hand held circular saw.

Three units framed and connected… ooh and my first drawer…

You can see my very first drawer in the image above. It was so cool to have a table saw and be able to rip all the sanded maple 1/2” plywood to the right dimension and then to length on the miter saw. I also made the dado in the drawer sides using the table saw, just putting each piece of stock through with the blade set to about 1/4” height and shifting it 1/16” for three passes. I was able to cut the drawer bottoms by just ripping the panels to the right width ( the inside width of the drawer plus 3/8” so it sits inside the dado). I used a very simple butt joint with glue and pre-drilled countersunk 1” screws. The drawer slides are nice 24” full extension slides so it’s easy to get to everything in the drawers. I intentionally set them back from the front of the unit so that there are still clamping surfaces and to protect them from getting sawdust and such into them. You can also see the bench tops which are two layers of 1/2 plywood.

All the drawers installed and the miter saw in it’s new home…

The next part was to add the pegboard on 2/3 of the bench to hang up tools and some shelves on the last 1/3 of the bench to have some open shelf storage. There is also a shelf under the miter saw as well and floor storage under that. I also installed and set up the other tools: drill press and sanding station.

All the tools installed on the bench top, pegboard and shelves as well…

After putting stuff in the drawers and hanging up a bunch of tools, I installed the miter saw adjustable stop and ruler. I built a jig for my router and carefully routed a channel to install it after doing some work to level/flatten the infeed side of the bench. The stop came out great and it largely removes the need to measure and mark when I’m cutting multiple pieces.

So that’s the whole saga… It took about five days or so end to end and I think it is a good representation of my original design. I’m very happy with the functionality, the machines, and the storage. I’m reviewing my design for the bed project and I’ll probably get started on that in a week or so.

Basement progress... Phase 2 complete...

May 6, 2020

Phase 2 went quickly since I had all the materials. Most interesting problem was trying to drive screws into the old timber in the house. Apparently after 91 years the wood gets pretty tough. In any case, there was a bit of work moving things out of the way and then realizing that the pallet that we use to keep stuff off the damp floor was going to need to be cut down to allow for the new shelves. Here is a picture of it partially framed and then finished with stuff put away. We reclaimed many square feet of floor space…

Of course this has generated a bunch of debris that now needs to be packaged up to be acceptable to the trash folks… But, now there is clean space to work on other projects. Next up, getting some bicycles in operating condition.

Basement progress... Phase 1 complete...

May 5, 2020

Whew, I put the plywood shelf skins on today. The most challenging part of that process was digging the sheets of plywood out of my pile of scrap wood in the garage. Remind me to be more thoughtful about what order I stack it in when I’m done with all of this… So here is the finished product for phase 1:

It has allowed me to get rid of an old wheeled storage cart that was on the left freeing up floor space. Now I’ve got room to spare and everything is well separated from the sometimes damp floor. On to phase two tomorrow, on the other side of the room. Have to clear a bunch of stuff out of the way to get there.

Why not start in the basement...

May 1, 2020

When we first moved into this house twenty four years ago, we went through the usual first time homeowner spasm of house projects. There was painting, wall papering, gardening, and building storage and work space in the basement. As with many folks, our ardor for house projects waned as other priorities took over. So here I am twenty four years down the road and I’ve decided to work on building some more storage in the basement for tools and materials etc… One part of it will be next to the workbench that I built back then (and I really don’t recall why I didn’t tear out the decrepit table they had in the corner at the time) and the other will replace some rickety metal shelving I have over by the chimney base.

Here’s what the old table (which could be from 1929 based on the lumber) looked like:

You’ll have to imagine all the crap I had to clear off of it and from below it to get to this state. Here is the result of today’s efforts in breaking it down and removing it.