Project 1: basement storage unit

It's always been my wife's dream to have a woodworking workshop at home. Now that we actually own a building she will be able to do this, but we will have to do some reconfiguring of the basment floorplan to make it work. As it stands, there are 4 general areas to the basement: (1) the garden unit - includes a bedroom, living room, small desk area, kitchen and bathroom (2) boiler room - is about 10X8 and includes boiler, hot water heater/tank, old hot water tank, misc shelves and storage, and also has a window (3) the "dark room" - so named because the walls are covered with roofing paper to block out the light because it was actual used as a dark room by a previous tenant. it's about 8 X 10, windowless, and (4) the laundry area which has a single tub utility sink, a washer, two electric dryers, a window on each wall, a couple of shelving units, a treadmill (for current 2nd floor tenant), two unclaimed bicycles, several semi-used buckets of paint, an old not-connected radiator and other misc junk. This area is about 10X20. Area 3 - the dark room, is to be the workshop, but right now it is full of 2nd floor tenants stuff - mostly old junk from her previous house just thrown in there, and even if empty it is not quite big enough for a workshop. So the plan is to build her a smaller storage unit in the utility area (approx 4X10) that will be large enough for her stuff if it is organized. Then we will move wall shared by the dark room and the boiler room to make the dark room bigger by about 4 feet (to about 12 x 10) and to give it the window. This will reduce the storage in the boiler room but should not interfere with anthing else.

We began this project about 1 month ago with the help of my father-in-law, who seems to know everything about everything when it comes to houses. Both the dark room and the boiler room are very old and framed out of 1x6's that double as the paneling and the framing. For our project we did standard 2x4 framing and are using pegboard for panelling (our assumptions are that this (a) let's light in, since there is not light in the storage unit - yet, and (b) let's air in, to keep things from getting musty.

Well, we didn't finish the project in one day as planned. It turned out that we got distracted by a lot of other things (like water flowing through the back porch roof in the middle of a rainstorm), didn't by enough wood (actually only bought about 1/2 as much as we needed) and generally started late. We both have about 17 minutes of free time per week, so it took a while, but last week J went over early on Saturday and cut the rest of the boards while M (that's me) went over later and nailed them and the peg board up. Not my best work, but most of the job is done. What remains is to install the folding door. The door needs to be shortened because the ceiling is not full height (it's about 6ft10inches), and we need to find a good way to anchor the door to the floor.

Project 1 complete (almost).