Since we moved to Fort Collins, our garage has been a big mess waiting for me to work on it. Last year, while I was working on the adjacent bathroom, I finally started on it, and now I’m finally writing about it.
Once my permit application was approved (City of Fort Collins Building Services does this very quickly), I started running an extension on the electrical circuit in the garage. There was a row of single-phase electrical outlets on the north wall of the garage, as well as a box with split-phase supply for a future electric car charger, but no outlets on the south wall where I want my workshop to be. I put three outlet boxes on the wall where it was open, and ran a 12AWG cable through those and up across the ceiling to connect to the circuit on the other side of the garage.
I needed those outlets installed so that I could use them while I remodeled the bathroom, so I put them in the wall and got the rough electrical inspection done before I had drywall. After putting in insulation, when I put in the drywall, I realized I hadn’t done a great job with the outlet boxes. They were at the wrong depth and not perfectly aligned with the holes I cut in the drywall. In order to work around both of those issues, I needed to use outlet box extensions with a fairly wide plate surface. The hardware store sells outlet box extensions, but they weren’t quite big enough for me to use. Instead, I designed and 3D-printed my own. These have a pretty big face plate section, maybe too big for a regular-sized outlet plate, but that’s fine.
Another project that I have been waiting to do is to wire this house for Ethernet networking. I want to position our server rack in the basement next to our other utility appliances where it can be hidden at a pretty constant temperature. The best way to get the cables into all the rooms in the house from the basement is to route them up through the garage wall and into the attic before running them down into the north half of the house.
Since I was already working on the garage wall, I also drilled holes to guide networking cables from the garage attic down into the basement. I put an access hole in the existing garage wall, and passed a string down through the wall that I can use to pull cables through.
After the drywall, mudding, and painting was all done, I bought some large 4x8ft sheets of pegboard in order to re-create the vibe of my garage shop at our old house. I painted all those sheets of pegboard with chalkboard paint, and hung them on furring strips across the length of the wall.
I’m looking forward to doing a lot of fun projects in this workshop, once I have finished cleaning and organizing everything.