Category: DIY

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DIY: Garage Storage Part I

Our new house has a nice, attached, 2-car garage. Our 2 vehicles fit side by side with no room to spare. It feels like that’s all there’s room for in there but we also want to fit holiday storage, bicycles, garbage/recycling bins, and ideally a workbench. Here is a horrible Microsoft Paint sketch of our garage space before we tore out the shelving:

These past 2 weekends we built new shelving and workbenches to make it feel a little bigger. The first thing we did was rip out the old shelving. Yay, a fresh canvas!

I had already drawn up some plans for what I wanted the new shelving to look like on my trusty graph paper. So next it was a trip (or 2) to Menard’s to get supplies. We built shelving 2′ down from the ceiling that wraps around the perimeter of the garage (as much as it can until the garage door gets in the way). We wanted it to be suspended shelving because our main priority in the project was to still be able to park cars in there and we have to park close to the walls to fit. Therefore we could not have any ground supports for the shelving. The shelves on both sides were constructed the same, just mirrored. Here are some rough (by “rough” I mean that I didn’t bother to add any hardware. They are drawn to scale) CAD drawings of the shelves from the right-side:

Overhead Storage From Above

Overhead Storage From Below

 

We also built a wall-mounted workbench on the right side in front of Amy’s car. In fact, we built 2 workbenches! The second is on wheels and the top can be raised/lowered so that it can be tucked under the wall-mounted one when not in use.

Here are the rough CAD sketches of those:

Permanent Workbench – From Above

Permanent Workbench – From Below

Mobile Workbench – Raised

Mobile Workbench – Lowered

Mobile Workbench – From Below

Here’s a sketch of the whole garage with all the new stuff:

And lastly, here are pictures of the garage after it’s full of stuff:

Right Side

Left Side (Has been modified to use an angle brace on the back wall instead of the vertical support shown here that blocks access to the shelf)

 

If you are interested in plans (they’re pretty simple and easy to adapt!) I intend to do a follow-up including my original sketches and measurements.

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Frugal Fix Friday: Lawn Mower

mower
Our lawn mower was running ROUGH! Not a little rough, but dislocate-your-shoulder-trying-to-start-it rough. Eventually we could usually get it started, but would most likely get injured in the process.

Starting: We would yank the cord furiously trying to make it start and would have little luck, and every once in a while it would just lock and the cord wouldn’t pull like you’d expect. Ouch. With some persistence it would start though.

Running: It ran rough. It seemed louder than when we had first bought it. There was an occasional clanking sound like metal hitting metal. Also, It couldn’t handle thick grass like it used to. It would get bogged down and stall really easily.

Cause: We suspected at least 2 footballs had been run over as well as a tree root (possibly more than one).

We really were not sure what to do about this. We thought we’d have to go buy a new mower. We really didn’t want to since this one was only a couple years old to begin with. Fortunately, doing some research online led us to other people with similar problems and an easy (and cheap) solution!

It turned out the problem was a tiny little piece of aluminum (or something soft like that) called a flywheel key. We went to a local small engine shop and bought a 2 pack of flywheel keys for $2. Put one in and the engine was running MUCH, MUCH better!

The video below is a good explanation of how to get at and replace the flywheel key. My only comment is that before you take a hammer to your mower and risk damage. Try just grabbing your flywheel on opposite sites and giving it a pull. Mine came right off without the need to bash it. If that doesn’t work, then give his hammer trick a whirl. His is better (less damaging) than others I’ve seen.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4aFXHwxuhs]

Since we had the mower mostly apart we actually decided to go a little further and we cleaned out the cylinder head and muffler with carb cleaner. This is because we had been getting some black smoke when starting the engine sometimes. We suspect that this is a result of running our engine rough for so long (about a year!)

All said and done we fixed our problem for $2 dollars and went the extra mile for the cost of half a can of carb cleaner.

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Frugal Fix Friday: The Dryer

Cat in a clothes dryer
Image via Wikipedia

With the rate things have been breaking at our house lately, we’d be bankrupt in no time hiring people to fix them!

What happened now, you ask? Our dryer. It’ll tumble some clothes like a champ, but apply heat and actually dry them? Um, no.

Fortunately, Sears has a generous amount of documentation online for their appliances. With that and some other resources, I was able to get the flame lit and the clothes dry. Yay!

To fix it, the first thing I checked was the thermal fuse. Apparently it is pretty common for it to trip and then it must be replaced. Ours had continuity, so I moved on. I tested every other thermostat and tester I could find. They all appeared to be fine.

I wasn’t sure what to do next. So, I turned on the dryer and watched the burner while it ran. The ignition coil would glow red hot, then it would make a clicking sound and shut off. It turns out, that clicking sound is the electricity going to the ignition coil being redirected to the gas valve. So, it was apparent that the gas valve wasn’t opening. Looked up that part online and the gas valve is over $100. Not cool. There are also 2 little coils on top of the valve, solenoid coils, they are only $20. It seemed to be worthy gamble to replace those first and cross fingers.

That worked. They were really easy to replace, and only cost $20. Now our dryer is spitting out fluffy warm clothes again. 🙂

Here are some great resources for fixing your dryer:

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Frugal Fix Friday: Washing Machine

The washing machine was broken. It wasn’t agitating the clothes and therefore not washing them so much as just rinsing them in water. A visit from the repairman would cost at least $60. No, thank you!

We dissected the agitator and found these little flaps with worn teeth. I later found out these are called “Agitator dogs”.

With a quick online search for our machine’s model number at Searspartsdirect.com we found the exploded diagram of our machine. Using this diagram we could identify the part number of the pieces in our hands. We looked them up and ordered replacements from Sears. It cost about 9 dollars.

A couple days later the part arrived and less than 10 minutes later the wash machine was working great!

I can’t believe we used to pay people to fix things!

I wanted to post some pictures to show where this part is, but while looking for a good pic I found this video that goes through the entire repair instead.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5wIN1J70-Y]