Author Archives: Mike

Garage Shelves

This is one of those projects I’ve meant to get to since moving into our house.  Storage in the garage has been mostly an afterthought, consisting mainly of leftover cabinets and pantry shelves from the kitchen before a remodel by the previous homeowners.

The first step was to clear everything from the wall.

Can you see how long those shelves must have been there?

The wall where the garage meets the rest of the house is the only one with drywall. The rest of the garage is unfinished. But the wall with drywall never got mud and taped.  I changed that:

Next, I painted the wall using a mix of many paint samples that we’ve accumulated over the past couple of years.  I mixed them all together in a 2 gallon bucket.

This is what it looked like after one coat of paint.  I like the color, which makes sense, because it’s a mix of all the colors we liked enough to buy samples of them.

It’s nothing special, but is a much better use of the space than before and cost only about $50 for all of the brackets holding up 1×12 pine common boards.   The bottom shelf is actually made from recycled wood from the cabinet that was there before.  I’m also happy to have more floor space open against the wall, both for cleaning and to store bulkier lawn equipment.  The next projects in the garage will be putting insulation and drywall in other areas and fixing the cracks in the floor.

Framing a Mirror

Finishing the basement bathroom (left), and putting a frame around the mirror, made us want to finally put a frame around the mirror in the upstairs bathroom (right), which we remodeled two years earlier.

In the basement bathroom, we used inexpensive pine boards and gave them a “distressed” appearance using three different colors of stain.  The basement frame also needed to be functional as it held the mirror in place with grooves cut into the back side.  For the upstairs mirror, we decided to go with a more polished white style of frame.  We bought some white primed pieces of trim.  I detail how I cut them by hand using a circular saw in this earlier post.

The big challenge with this project was how I was building the frame.  Since this bathroom gets a lot more use, I wanted to be able to remove the frame occasionally to clean the mirror.  That meant I couldn’t simply router out a groove for the mirror and nail the four pieces to the wall.  I would need to learn how to glue together the miter cut corners.

As you see in the photo above, I used clamps to hold the two pieces together, then drilled a hole where a dowel would be inserted along with some glue.

After the glue and dowel came rubber bands, a lot of rubber bands.

Since I was in no big hurry to finish, I let the glue set for a couple of days before cutting off the extra pieces of dowel.  That was followed by a little sanding and two coats of semi-gloss white paint.

The frame is held to the wall by ordinary picture frame mounting kit pieces and two nails in the drywall.

We’re happy with the results.  Thanks for checking out our blog!