Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Start the New Year off Right


The Christmas and New Year break tends to be quite hectic with family and stuff, but in amongst it all, I managed to get almost 2 days of work done towards getting me eventually into my new train shed.

The first order of the day was to clean up the lounge room a bit. So off to Office Works for a pile more of the 10 litre storage boxes - I've standardised on the StarMaid brand's Storemate style, as the plastic seems to be nice and pliable and so far in over 5 years or more, none have cracked up on me.

Here is shelving that used to contain all sorts of cardboard boxes and loose items, all now nice and tidy.


Next I hit the garage for a bit of a clean-up and chuck out of non-wanted items. This led to me actually putting a small 2½ cc internal combustion engine I found I still had from my hobbies of over 30 years ago on eBay - now I am a Seller! At least by the end of the day I was able to sweep the garage out and then turn the hose on it and make it dust free - for at least a short time until the car came in again.

A shot of some shelving up on high with a pile of train stuff boxed up and out of the way. 


Probably half of the stuff in boxes out in the garage are empty boxes for wagons. I tend to keep them on the off-chance I might one day sell a wagon - then I'll have the box it came in. The wagons actually live indoors in a pile of foam lines standard draws the club sells the makings for. This gives a standard easy way to lug them around to and from the club and shows. Here are the trays I keep the wagons in:


And the larger box that protects the trays and allows me to lug them around to shows:


Anyway, here is more storage above head height. The rafters make it easy to bolt hanging bars and then shelves to them. It was a good idea they had when they lifted my house all those years ago to give plenty of headroom downstairs. Sure allows me some extra storage space.



What the heck, here is another shot of storage boxes on shelves. Here you can sort of make out the length of the garage as well:


Finally - nice and clean and no railway items to bee seen down low:


Here is car in at the end of the first day - you can make out the shelves on the left are pretty empty, as all railway related items are in storage boxes.


The next day started with a trip out to Bunnings and the purchase of 2 shelving racks from the Handy Storage range.  I picked the 5 shelf version which is 1830mm H x 910mm W x 400mm D. These are neat in that they are all keyhole construction and hence only a rubber mallet is required to put it together. I also purchased a draw for each rack as well. Now all my tools and nuts, bolts, nails and stuff will have a new home.

I forgot to take a photo before the car came back in, but you can see the shelves in this shot and I even moved some of the tools into their new homes.


Some of the nuts, bolts and nails have made it onto their new shelves too. Many more to go - but at least I got it started over the break:


At the back to the left of the new shelves, will be another set of shelves from the old shed, to store a pile more kits from the old shed.


You can see that once I get more shelves and ladders up against the left wall, that the car will have to go live outside for a while. The plan is for a carport one day within the next 2 years.


So that's it from the break, but at least I've gotten into it and can hopefully keep up some momentum and get all the keepable items out of the old shed and into the garage really soon. Then the demolition team can be called to come in.  See you next time.