More work in the garage

This weekend, I continued organizing the garage. I decided that it is more important to finish getting the garage in order while I'm still on summer break than to restart the mural -- I can just about get the garage set up & fully usable in the time I have left, plus, life goal: stop starting/restarting projects before I have finished the previous one(s).

Now that we have our bikes finished, job number one this weekend was to find a place to park them. Ideally, I wanted a spot that is both convenient and isn't visible from the open garage door or any windows, so that people won't get any fancy ideas about breaking in to steal our bikes later if they happen to get a peek. I settled on this spot under the concrete front steps:

It is a small area with a low ceiling and an awkwardly placed post supporting the steps and porch above, so I haven't been sure exactly what I wanted to do with it. Happily, it turned out that the bikes fit perfectly there, so all I had to do was outfit the space a little. I used a door and two windows left from the part of the house that was redone during construction to build a dividing wall:

It's a little hard to get a photo of because the pool table is in the way, so here it is from another angle:

What I like best about this, besides the fact that I found a way to reuse materials that have been part of the house for sixty years and more, is that the glass allows the bikes themselves to become design elements in the larger room. 

Next, I made a tool board in the workshop part of the garage to free up shelf space and make it easier to have the tools we need ready at hand while we're working:

Again, a reused piece of plywood from the construction project. And again, to keep anyone passing by the open garage door from getting any fancy ideas about breaking in to poke around for expensive tools later (not that we have anything particularly expensive, but a peeker wouldn't necessarily know that), I hung a small curtain above it that I can let down to conceal the tools (& also keep dust off them) while we're not working on something:

Yes, there is a theme here: having our bikes stolen off the front porch has made me even more aware of not advertising the stuff we have to passersby. I admit it. But this is a city. It's not crazy to be more careful. 

Lastly, I continued working on the design of the DuserHaus. I stripped the paint off of one of the windows that was originally on the little room in the garage and rehung it in the same spot (except on the opposite side of the wall, so that it will open out):

Then I took one that was originally in the "rooms" under the kitchen, and hung it on the other end of the DuserHaus wall:

Aside from a few pieces of lumber, this is officially the last piece of the pre-construction house that I saved for reuse. I actually tried to get rid of that door a couple weeks ago, because I still couldn't think of a project for it and I have a rule about not keeping things around indefinitely if I don't have a specific plan for them (this is what I tell AJ to convince her that I'm not a hoarder). The two people I offered it to couldn't use it, and I just hadn't gotten around to putting it on Craigslist. I'm very satisfied that these pieces all came together so well this weekend.

Next weekend -- the last one of my summer vacation -- I'm going to put rice paper on the outside of the DuserHaus to create the sense of a wall, but still allow light to come through, and do some more storage reorganization to get the rest of the space ship shape.