So my wife and I participated in Earth Hour last night. No big deal as we turned off all the lights and put the laptops and TVs to sleep. (Minus my daughter’s of course. We were too tired from unpacking and shuffling stuff to argue with her.) I even managed to move some things using a candle lantern for light.
Then after it was over I turned on some lights and finished more stuff. Eventually this led to me going out and working on stuff in there until just a few moments ago.
But I _did_ get something very cool accomplished - I measured the entire internal dimensions of the walls of the garage.
Why is this cool? Because I’m a geek and I have several wonderful CAD programs available to me so I can accurately plan and layout where things go and what I want to do with them. I did this at the other house as well and it worked out quite well. I’ll eventually get around to measuring all the other rooms and drawing them up in the computer as well but getting the garage done first is important to me because that means I can start to lay out things for configuring it to my needs.
Besides the mechanical stuff there are likely going to be three main areas - electronics/computers, woodworking, and metalworking. (I’m hoping to have room for a pool table but that may or may not happen.) Some of the computer stuff will go out there but I think the rest might have to go in the partial basement. The servers are already going to go down there but I’m not wild about the outside-only access of that space. Maybe in the future I can enclose that spot. It would mean extending the house out another 5 - 10 feet but it might be worth it.
*chuckle* Here’s an idea...
The partial basement is right below the library. I _could_ put in a trap door and a ladder in the corner of the library. In fact that would be a good thing as it would be the safest place for us to go if there was a tornado. (Oddly I think currently the hall closet would likely be the safest main floor place to go in the event of a tornado.) If I put the hole in the floor in the southeast corner of the library and enclose that downstairs that would be a significant improvement over what we have now which is basically nothing. Hmm...something to think about for the future...
In other news the ceiling in the garage is not as weak as I feared. I dug a little deeper into it and there are collar ties being used as the floor joists for the ceiling. And those run unbroken all the way across. So I had no problem putting a bunch of stuff up there to get it out of my way so I could work.
Now it’s getting what’s left organized...
