Garage Upgrades

I honestly don't know. If your garage floor is getting wet because water seeps up from the ground into it, you might have a house drainage problem which should be mitigated with a french drain and possibly a sump. And that's important to do, because if the water is hitting the garage floor, it's probably also attacking your foundation.

Sucks, huh?

 

We can talk on the phone about it sometime. Water intruding into your foundation is bad news. Do you have a basement that's lower than your garage? Do you get water into your basement?

 

Sounds like condensation. Does it happen to your neighbors?

 

If you work with a reputable outfit, they should have the expertise to diagnose your situation.

 

One accumulates a Milwaukee collection over a period of several years. These tools go on sale at Home Depot frequently.

Their 12V 1/4” hex impact driver is BY FAR my most-used power tool. For almost any kind of project — auto, electrical, plumbing, hanging pictures, nearly anything — that tool comes along. I use it more than all the other power tools put together.

It’s light and it’s powerful without being too powerful. I first bought their 3/8” ratchet tool; I thought it would be awesome, but the pistol grip tool is far easier to work on with most fasteners. Zip, zip, zip…. I put a 3/8” adapter on it and drive 3/8” sockets frequently.

 

There are a lot of cabinet options these days.
One thing I’ll say is that I’m fastidious about putting my tools away after a project, because it’s awful to get into a project and not be able to find what you need. Especially wrenches and sockets!

I often roll my big blue tool chest to the car I’m working on. And I installed locking casters on the two cabinets under my work table, so I have two rolling, portable carts to hold things as I work. One auto tip I learned is put tools and parts on carts and not along the car engine, so you don’t lose them.

You can drive down to Oregon and work on your car here anytime.

Here are the two carts from the last project.

 

It’s not “all that.”
I’ve waited a lifetime to own a house with a decent garage. I looked at many with 3-car garages. But this house has a “barely 2-car” garage. The good side is that it was much less expensive to refinish the floor, since they charge by the square foot.

I’m very happy with it, and I hope I’m not being a show off. You can find garages on YouTube that make mine look like a junkyard.

 

The garage is nothing. You should see what I go through to make a cup of coffee every morning. I tell myself that it’s less time and expense than going to a cafe, and it is. But my espresso maker wouldn’t fit on my kitchen counter well, so I bought a new kitchen cabinet and countertop at Lowe’s and installed it in my breakfast nook. Then I ran plumbing from under my kitchen sink to the new cabinet, into a filter system, into the espresso machine.

The beans need to be 5 to 20 days from the roast date. For each cup, I weigh the beans, grind them, and pull the espresso shot with my cup on a scale. I follow a recipe of 15 grams of beans, and 30 grams of liquid espresso at 201F in 30 seconds. Once you learn how, it’s pretty easy.

Which, it turns out, is easy compared to perfectly steaming the milk. Those espresso cups are from Caffe Vittoria, on Boston’s North End.

How do you waste your spare time?

 

Where are you moving?
I moved from the Bay Area to the Portland area recently.