As a result of a busy schedule involving two jobs, house repairs, the garage upgrade, 3 kids home on school holidays and other pressing matters, I’ve managed to let 3 weeks slide without updating the site! Apologies!
Without further ado, here is where the #garage2workshop transformation is at. Sadly, it is not even close to being finished, I make for a terrible project manager apparently.
One thing that had to be done was dismantling the old workbench. I must admit this was harder to do than I expected. The bench, although wobbly, unbalance, petrol soaked and warped, was surprisingly well fixed together. I had to attack it with hand saw, circ saw, sledge hammer and brute force to get it to come apart. It probably didn’t help that the Fiat is in the way of it so there wasn’t that much room to work in, but I got there in the end.
Now, once the frame was done, plan was for a good friend of mine, who just so happens to be an electrician, to come round and run wires so I could keep on moving. But, as anyone who has ever renovated anything will tell you, it never works likes that.
He came around as planned. So far, so good. We had a really good look at the fuse box, instead of the cursory glance I gave it a few weeks earlier…uh oh. The fuse box in the garage said 40a, I had assumed it would be perfect for the 15a saw, other power, and lighting in the workshop. The problem was it was only going through a 28a fuse in the main fuse box. Which, just for fun, happens to be connected to the circuit that powers my kitchen and laundry. Ugh.
So had I turned the saw on, I would likely have blown the old porcelain fuse and lost power in the house as well as the garage. And maybe even started a fire. Not ideal.
And it just got worse from there. The main switchboard was a mess. It must be around 40 years old; its had fuses added, removed, switched around and god knows what else. It just was too dangerous to work with. I already knew by this stage that we would be running a new power line to the garage, but when my sparky suggested we replace the box with a new modern one, complete with safety switches (which the old one completely lacked) I had to agree that that was the way to go. It took a couple of weeks for him to have the time to do so which meant little progress elsewhere unfortunately.
To be quite honest, it completely blew my budget away, but I’m really happy that it’s done.
Now I can sleep knowing that if Monster decides it is a good idea to stick a knife into a power point, the safety switch will kick in and save the day. The new box is something that I should have done a long time ago. (And just for the record my mate did try and get me to do it a couple years back but I kept putting it off…)
There were more issues of course, including the rusty roof…I’ll update the site again tomorrow so all my readers can be just as frustrated with the lack of progress as I am!