Underdeck Bike Storage 2

Okay, been doing a little thinking about the under deck storage idea.
To review, we want to turn this long dark, head bumping, low overhead section of deck into useful storage.

My best idea so far is sorta a humongous pantry pull out for bicycles that could maybe look something like this.

Probably shouldn't of drew that in red pen....

Current Best Idea
Enclose the deep pocket above using the existing deck framing.
Make it water, critter and thief proof.
The front 'door' of the bike pullout will form the front of the 'cabinet'.
The door will lock securely to the deck framing.
The pull out will be made with simple angle iron (possibly old bed frames).
Using two angle iron pieces welded close enough together so that the bike tires fit in between them.
So each horizontal rung in the picture above will hold one bike.

Still To Solve
I need a way to keep the bikes upright so they don't domino everywhere when the pantry is pulled in and out.

The Mother Of All Caster Wheels
Check this baby out.

YEARS ago, I bought a ton of these surplus...They are crazy beefy.
That plate is ~10# of some kind of stainless steel!

They've got pneumatic cylinders and a cool heim joint. The axle for the wheel even rides on a sintered bronze bearing.

I plan to discombobulate these and use the cylinder and heim joints for some Halloween craziness and just use the wheels/yoke for the bike pull out.

Theres one little problem though.
I don't know how to remove this split pin to free up the heim joint.

Anybody have any ideas on how to remove these pins?

So, that's what I got so far.
Comments? Questions?

Clever Under Deck Bicycle Storage?

We've recently just realized that if we ever (ahem) get the basement apartment finished and rented out that all the 'stuff' we store down there has to go somewhere else...
Que me spending the next couple of days going through all of our giant piles of stuff to see what we can keep, toss, sell...hellooooooo Craigs List!

What I'd like to figure out is how to cleverly store our bicycles and yard tools under our deck.
That way we can free up the space in the garage to store the building supplies currently stored in the basement.

Bicycles

Yard Tools

We've got these big deep pockets on the driveway side formed by the decks super-structure.

One immediate problem is, is that the dang deck is too low to hang the bikes vertically.

They'll fit at roughly a 45 deg angle though.

Which brings to mind this kind of bike rack.

The commercially available outdoor bike storage sheds leave a lot to be desired.

We have no access from the top, we hate plastic, and I trying to avoid crawling under the deck to get the bikes out. The joists are EXACTLY at the right height for us to bonk our heads on just about EVERY freaking time we're under there. A couple of times I've bonked my head so hard I actually saw stars...I think I even saw the little yellow birds tweeting around my head ala classic Warner Bros. cartoons....

The Design Challenge
Somehow make use of the depth of the 'deck pockets' to store bikes, strollers, bicycle trailers in a safe, secure, weather tight way. Where we will not have to hunch over and walk under the deck to dig our bikes out.

I've pretty much got nothing....
Except build something that will hold the bikes like this.

But then the entire rack pulls out into the free 'no head bonking' air space.

Anybody else have any ideas?


 

Kitchen Space Ideas

Our kitchen is super tiny...I'm not talking about wanting a super big eat-in show place kitchen...this kitchen is not even big enough for all of our stuff...Or as we affectionately call this project,

Trying to fit 10 pounds of cr@p in a 5 pound sack.

Its not that the kitchen isn't nice, its nice enough....its just not big enough. We've never not had an eat in kitchen...that was a weird thing to get used to...HAVING to use the dining room....

Here's a shot of the sink wall.

Like the missing door on the sink cabinet.  I've got a theory on that...usually when you get cabinets on the inside of one of the sink doors is a sticker that shows the manf, the style and color for in case you want to order new cabinets to match...ours is missing...I've checked all over the kitchen for the manf sticker and there is none...I bet the PO's took it outta spite? I mean they appear to of taken the wall outlets when they left???

How do you get matching cabinets when you have no idea what you already own???

That space between our humoungous microwave and the dish drain is our main prep area! At least I got the knives up and out of the way.

Take a look at the lower cabinet door to the right of the dishwasher. Its a huge blind corner cabinet that is completely useless!!!

But we added these super cool multi-action sliding shelf things that let you access stuff waaaay in the back.

Because of the need for the shelves to clear the small door opening we have a net loss of space...but the space we do have we can use completely.

Now lets look at the West wall of the kitchen.

Believe it or not I think they actually did one thing right on this section.

The lower corner cabinet has a lazy susan!

We can actually use all that space.

Here's a weird thing about this section..

Its a weird corner-angled cabinet with no shelf that we've just sorta piled stuff into...not really a good use of this space...cept, I can't figure what would be a good use for it???

Here's the stove wall.

Little tight right?? It gets even better...

We want to remove the current stove and actually install our stove..

Problem is, its a 36" stove and the current stove is maybe 30"...we're going to have to remove that bank of drawers on the right and but in a skinnier unit...which actually works out for us as we don't have drawers for two of the bays anyways...

But that's a net loss of storage space...

A quick trip to IKEA yielded a pot/pan shelf which we put in over the doorway.

It's a little high but I can reach it okay.

So, even with the pot shelf and the cool sliding shelves we're already using all the space we got...

Well, except for....

This blind upper cabinet.

How can we use this space more intelligently? There is like 12" to the left of the door that's just completely useless...whoever designed this kitchen was really asleep on the job. A real corner cabinet with a lazy susan would of made this space actually useful...

This uh, nook?

Right now we put the recycling in it and the garbage next to it..and it looks kinda fugly....

What we'd like to do is turn this space into some kind of fabulous pull out pantry type of thing. I would love to get the garbage and recycling inside it AND have room for other things.

Anybody have any ideas on how to use this big tall space please let us know.

Cause we still would like to fit all of this stuff into the kitchen proper.

Our baking supplies.

The rest of our random appliances

oh, and the beer and soda too....

I'm having the suspicion that the cabinets came from one of the several uh, shady cabinet places in Oakland...you know, the kind of places where every things written in Chinese and they only accept cash??? I might just pull off the other sink door and take it around to all the cabinet places and see if they have a match.

And no we don't have any budget to 'blow out walls' and expand the size of the kitchen....

I also replaced the bad, bad, incandescent ceiling light.

With a good, good CFL model..

Wow, big change right?? Nope, The new model only uses 40W and it is slightly brighter than the old one.  With that and the addition of the under counter fluorescent lights I believe the kitchen is now title 24 compliant. I just need to change out the exhaust fan duct with rigid smooth wall ducting and I think all the code issues with the kitchen will be taken care of...

Why didn't they have the cabinets go all the way to the ceiling? In a kitchen this small every inch counts...

Storage Loft O Halloween Goodness

Man, Do We Need Storage!!
We decided that the center bay of the 3 bay garage would be a good place for a storage loft. Its ~5' to the bottom of the ridge board from the ceiling joists and its a low enough slope roof that we still have good height at the edges.

If we could use all the area above the ceiling joists in this bay we would have a 9' wide by 20' long by 5' high storage loft. This area was originally not designed even for 'light attic storage' so a lot of re-enforcing of the structure would have to happen.
The existing 2by6 joists spanned 9' were on 4' centers and half of them were spliced in the center!?!?!? I mean, its only 9' use a 10' 2by6 for petes sake!!!

My plan was to add new structural select 2by6's that would bear fully on the 2by4 double top plates of the walls separating the bays at 16" centers and to jack up the sistered joists and sister a complete 2by6 onto them. Then I would screw 3/4" plywood to the rafters to make my floor.

Here's a scary shot of one of the sistered joists. They only overlapped like two feet and where held together with only four nails!! Look how the wood is splitting and how they are sagging! Of course people are going to use this space for storage its perfect for it.

Using my Harbor Fright MultiMaster ripoff I cut hole in the drywall for the new joists. Love that sag in the joists visible in this shot.

New joists in and toe nailed to the top plates with 3 16D nails.

Here's me fixing one of the worst splices by sistering on two new joists. I predrilled for some long lags and lagged the heck out of it from both sides. It seems SUPER beefy and stable.

Adding the plywood subfloor. I love screwing plywood down...lots and lots and lots of screws.

Here's a shot of the framing I did for the opening. As you can see I didn't exactly plan my plywood seams and I didn't block the edges either...I'm not making a floor that's going to be tiled ya know....

One side of the storage loft finished.

Other side of the loft finished.
Look at all that space!!! No way we could fill that right? We'll have plenty of space for all of our Halloween stuff and the xmass stuff and heck lots of stuff right???

Here's the long side again..pretty much packed with bins and boxes and what not.

To the left of the access is all the big random stuff that can't be packed well...can you see Slappys hand?

Here's the short side...absolutely packed with bags of fake pumpkins and tombstones...holy moly are we going to have a lot of funkins for the Haunted Pumpkin Patch this year...guess its a good thing we finally got the yard for it. Picture the pumpkins from this years Halloween and at least double it!

I think we've entered a zero sum game with the Halloween decorations...

Storage! Storage! Storage!-Lumber Rack

Besides 'stuff' we have acquired waaaaaay to much building supplies..just check out the photos below. We have a giant stack of lumber in just about every room that would fit it..

Here's the big stack of 2by4's in the main shop area.

Here's a big stupid stack of house siding, plywood, sheet metal, and random dimensional lumber.

Then outside under this tarp we have a huge pile of 2by6's, more siding, a bunch of beefy framing lumber, and some ipe from the deck we built at our old house.

Way too much lumber piled all over the place. We decided that if we had one single nice place to store it that we could save a lot of indoor space. We came up with a simple ladder type design and decided to put this lumber rack in the back corner of the yard.

With plan in hand I cut all the wood ahead of time. With all the wood I was going through I was worried that there would be none left to put on the rack! A worry that turned out to be unfounded unfortunately...

I next set up a station so that I could glue and screw the uprights together. We had a bunch of PL premium laying around so I used that. Its supposed to be super strong and water proof. I don't want this rack collapsing if it gets wet.

Action shot of me working on the uprights.

I let the uprights dry for a day before I attached the cross pieces. I set up a simple jig with some saw horses and glued and screwed the two outside pieces first.

Then I squared up the frame and held it in place using bungee cords and clamps and glued-screwed the rest of the uprights.

Here's a picture of a finished uh,...rack? The racks are 3' wide and built 4 of them that I plan to space out to 12'.

I reused the 'clear plastic tarp of planty death' under my rack. I am going to attempt to keep what ever is on the rack dry and I didn't want moisture coming up from the ground. I was worried about making sure all the racks were aligned with each other in all dimensions cause if they were not they wouldn't support the wood properly and the wood could get twisted-deformed from the rack. This part was not super fun and it was oh, 100deg in the backyard at the time...man I sure do miss that big tree...

With all the racks aligned I screwed 2by6's to the top and both sides to lock the racks in place. The rack seems pretty strong with a reasonable amount of shear strength. Here's me loading the rack from the lumber in the outdoor pile. I probably spent more time sorting the garbage wood from the good than I did actually loading up the rack.

But now look!! ALL the wood from everywhere, that's worth keeping, is now neatly stored on the rack. Hurray!! We can actually get to different types of wood without having to dig through a humongous pile of wood! Its all sorted and ready to go for our next project!! I was able to bring the tarp all the way up on the back and part of of the way up on the sides. I will put another 6mil tarp over the top of this so that the wood will actually stay dry!

Here's another beautiful shot of the rack from the side. There's even room for all our metal, plumbing supplies and the bits of 'nice trim' I'm saving for some unknown reason... I feel like I could open up my own neighborhood lumber yard!