Operation Garage

Some of you may recall my recent ranting post about my company closing down my nice seaside office and moving us 30+ miles to a picturesque business and retail park on the M61 (if not you can read all about it here).  Well in the interests of reuse and environmentally friendly policies pretty much all the office furniture is being trashed!  It's 20-30 years old but really good quality and much of it is still in really good nick, but apparently there is no market for it to even be given away.  Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Now my garage has become a dumping ground, it used to be nice and tidy with a place for everything and everything in its place, but things have slipped and it is, quite frankly, a mess.  And so my mind hatched a plan of repurposing the office storage for my garage storage, with the permission of the site support manager (well he said I could take a couple of cabinets and a chair if I was discrete).  Thus was launched

Operation Garage!!!

Taking stock

It's a mess.

Boy is it a mess.

It's a panoramic mess

I figured I could easily get one of the double cabinets in the back of my car but then discovered that they were in fact modular in nature and I would be able to take them apart and get 2 in my car at a time and then rebuild them at home, as well as make them 4 units high.  So over the next few weeks as the site wound down and cabinets became empty I worked late broke them down and spirited them away to my garage.  Originally I was going for maybe half a dozen, in the end I have 15 of them - oops how did that happen.

First job I figured was to get the old cabinets out and put the new ones in so that I could then put stuff away.  I figured I'd tackle the left side first as there wasn't quite as much stuff on this side.  I wont bore you all with a step by step account of how I moved stuff, removed other stuff and assigned stuff to be binned.  But suffice to say I ended up with a lot of stuff to be binned.

2 car loads worth for the local tip

With the new cabinets in place and stuff getting slowly but surely sorted through and put away, but this was really starting to take far longer than I had planned it to.

So it has actually taken several months to finish as other things came along to divert my attention, and then there was Christmas and the numerous parties and wotnot.  But I am pleased to say I actually finished before the end of the year..... just.

Panoramic tidy now

Floor, there is a floor!

Ahh the fans, well they were being thrown away as well as the new office has aircon, be a shame to waste them and I can always put them on evil bay.

The big yellow box is one of SWMBO's school projects, already robbing space before the place was even finished.

Unpacking the final Garage Raiding finds (more on that in another blog entry).  

Somewhere under there is the Afghan compound I was working on some time ago, there will be some progress on that now I've finished the garage.  There is plenty of space now for me to have multiple projects on the go in the expansion of the Painting Bureau.

Plenty of storage my toys with 3 full cupboards of storage and a drawer.

The mahoooosive cardboard tube is another nice find from the office shut down, not really sure what I will use it for but I can see a stone dunn or suchlike.

There's even a cupboard for my old games and books

So from the above you will gather that there will soon be entries for the final instalment of Garage Raiding (yet to be written with another snappy title) and something around that Afghan compound.  So stop back soon peeps.