How much stuff is in your shop?

wae (Forum Supporter) said:

eastsideTim said:

dculberson (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to spandak :

I donate as much as I can but there's stuff that even habitat for humanity won't take that's still usable. Car parts don't make great donations. 

That's my problem too - most of what I have is car parts of some sort.

Or parts of car parts.  I've got a whole container full of random bushings that came from swaybar endlink sets.  One day, I will have an endlink where JUST ONE BUSHING is bad, and then who will be laughing??? 

Probably you because I'll have eleventybillion bushings and not one of them will be the right size.

Sweet, I can bring over a bunch of Honda polyurethane bushings for you to store!  

eastsideTim said:

wae (Forum Supporter) said:

eastsideTim said:

dculberson (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to spandak :

I donate as much as I can but there's stuff that even habitat for humanity won't take that's still usable. Car parts don't make great donations. 

That's my problem too - most of what I have is car parts of some sort.

Or parts of car parts.  I've got a whole container full of random bushings that came from swaybar endlink sets.  One day, I will have an endlink where JUST ONE BUSHING is bad, and then who will be laughing??? 

Probably you because I'll have eleventybillion bushings and not one of them will be the right size.

Sweet, I can bring over a bunch of Honda polyurethane bushings for you to store!  

Damn you.  You talked me in to it.

Some of you guys make me feel good about my garage and others make me feel like crap lol. 

My stuff is strung across my home in central Florida, the "shop" on my parents property in central Florida, and my temp residence here in SoCal. My home garage houses my S2000, a squat rack/bench/pull up bar, tool box, some old kitchen countertop, and way too much of my kids and their moms crap. Their mom is a hoarder, her mom hoards stuff then pawns it off on her, and it's a viscous cycle. Anytime I'm back home I clear out the garage, make a million trips to local donation spots, and by the time I go on work travel again and come home it's the same process. I could fit the E36 M3 or Champcar in my garage as well if it weren't for that :(. 

Currently saving up to buy some property and build a proper shop with an apartment to be my new home and the home for all my cars and toys. 

My dad's at home shop(where I work) is in a constant state of disheveled, always one more thing in the way than you remember, and actually works pretty well.

I didn't exactly get rid of stuff but I spent some time and a little money organizing them. One thing that been a thorn in my side is the used car fluids. They're always in the way and always ugly and messy. I found a deal on some high quality stackable 5 gallon jugs and I already feel so organized!

all the jugs and buckets on the right are what held what's on the left. 

As of 5 minutes ago.. not as crowded as it usually is because I just moved my engine hoist and engine stand back to my shed as well as a bunch of boxes of parts that I am not using. And a couple weeks ago that was an engine transmission and about half of the parts of that Raider sitting around.. 

the workbench on the left is on wheels and rolls away under the cabinets when not being used. When everything is put away where it's supposed to be (rare) I can put two cars in there (granted, my garage cars are the Raider, an e30, and the Porsche, so they're all pretty small footprint).  The shelf above and up to the right over the workbench has about 20 wheels/tires on it (most of them related to the rally car). The white thing up top is a narrow (1 foot wide) shelf going the whole distance of the garage front to back (it's a 20-foot 2x4 frame), and all the bins on it are for lightweight stuff. 

The wall to my left/behind me in the pic has cabinets a fold-down table, and shoulder-height shelves that have about a dozen of the black and yellow Home Depot boxes labeled/inventoried with parts for my various cars. 

wae (Forum Supporter) said:

Man, I wish I could bring myself to throw stuff out.  It just causes me near-physical pain to throw something in the dumpster that someone, somewhere, sometime could make use of.  I've been told it's my German heritage.

Thats how i ended up with the stuff i had hoarded. Kept it with good intentions, someone could use it, didnt want to waste it.  Then i had a real good shake up/wake up in my life and decided to get my space back. 
 

i usually call it "pissed cleaning". You gotta look at the stuff and get mad at it. Start small. Get motivated fast. I got to where i couldn't wait to throw more crap away. When tossing it to the dumpster id see something i had spent way too much time on for no reason, give it a extra BERK YOU! and slam it in. 

I've offered up stuff for free, if no one takes me up on it, away it goes.

In reply to TJL :

My wife once bought this giant gazebo thing for our deck. It arrived on a straight truck with a liftgate and was secured to a pallet.  After assembling the gazebo thing, I thought it was great that I had this pallet because I was sure it was a Very Useful Thing and I just knew I would find Something Amazing to do with it.

Five years later, I continued to trip over that stupid pallet every time I was out in the garage so I had enough and one night I cut it up and burned it in my fire pit while drinking whisky and smoking a cigar.  It was supremely satisfying.

The very next day I was trying to figure out how to work my brand new manual tire machine.  I was having a heck of a time trying to figure out how to hold it down and it was late at night and the hardware stores were all closed.  So I went down to my computer and did some searching on YouTube and other places for some tips and tricks.  My wife was in the room with me and I found one video where the guy talked about bolting the tire machine down to a pallet.  My wife, knowing that that I had just burned the pallet I had been tripping over for five freaking years, nearly died from laughing when the guy on the other end of the YouTube video talked about how easy it was to get a pallet saying "you can find them anywhere!".  To this day, any time she sees a skid anywhere, she taps me on the shoulder, points, and says "look, honey!  A pallet!  You can find them anywhere!" and collapses in a fit of laughter.

This is why I can't throw things out.

In reply to wae (Forum Supporter) :

Friends like these, eh?!

We have way too much stuff in our shop. And also, somehow, not nearly enough.

About another week's worth of cleanup and things are looking better.

There's room to work on the minibike, and at the workbench, and still room to pull the Beetle or Miata in.  There will be a bit more once some stuff is sent out to people who've claimed it in my garage sale thread.

Still need to do another pass and get even more aggressive.  Would be nice to have room to pull the scooters and bikes in and out of the other garage bay without having to shuffle a car out of the way.  And it'd be nice to get rid of the 10x10 storage locker.  I've also considered getting rid of a lot of hardware and spares, and just accepting that I'll need to buy some of it again someday, but at least it won't be clogging up my garage.

I only have one big project on the horizon, and I do not intend to start gathering parts for it for a while, not until I'm ready to actually execute on it.

EastCoastMojo (Forum Supporter) said:

We have way too much stuff in our shop. And also, somehow, not nearly enough.

This is always my issue. Frequently, even with all the stuff in the shop, I don't have that one thing that I need. Then it's off to the hardware store. Where I buy extras just incase I need one in the future and add to the pile of stuff. 

Toyman01 (Forum Supporter) said:

EastCoastMojo (Forum Supporter) said:

We have way too much stuff in our shop. And also, somehow, not nearly enough.

This is always my issue. Frequently, even with all the stuff in the shop, I don't have that one thing that I need. Then it's off to the hardware store. Where I buy extras just incase I need one in the future and add to the pile of stuff. 

I’m beginning to think I need to store my spares at the auto parts store and the hardware store - even if it slows me down occasionally.

@wae you could have gone to the store, bought the wood and made your own pallet and still had less time in it then you did moving that pallet around for five years. When this finally sank in for me it freed up so much time and space that I'm not going back.

EastsideTim yes, the hardware and parts stores will store stuff for you and it makes life so much better. For the race cars I keep the stuff that actually goes bad not the stuff that might. I've never had a crank pulley go bad...........why do I need 7 of them??

My new mindset is; if the part rarely or never fails, is available new and under $50, I'm not keeping extras. I had 5 cabinet draws full of stuff like this which freed up space for tools that had been stored on the work bench. 

It's hard to fathom how much time get's wasted pulling or moving things around.