Hey friends,

With the workshop plan shelved, I spent the weekend clearing the garage and ameliorating my tool organisation.

When buying the house my initial idea for this garage was to put up an insulated dividing wall opposite the utility area with seating to act as a boot room. That plan got scrapped but a divider of sorts was still a good idea.

A while back, Steve gave me some industrial storage racks which I set up back to back to create the divide.

The top shelf holds all my tool boxes and paints. The shelf below has all my power tools at eye level for quick grab and go. Below that I started separating the smaller items into three storage drawers.

I kept moving things around to get the perfect fit and used some scrap MDF from my wardrobe project to make drawer dividers.

Anyone else keep the magic box of random screws which always serves up what you need when you need it?

Near to the door, this shelf also holds the things I use most frequently: PPE, tape measures, hammers etc.

Below that is my shop vac, painting/decorating box and a couple of other boxes for the miscellaneous items. There's always miscellaneous!

Opposite, on the washing machine wall I turned this old filing cabinet into more storage grouped together in trades (+ sealants 🤷‍♂️).

I've never been so organised with my tools before. Feels good! It's also been a useful experiment to see how much can be packed into well structured system. If I can make the external garage a little more functional for my mitre saw cutting this might be as good as it need be.

The other rack mostly holds my material offcuts and bits and pieces I need to sell/get rid of. I think I can do without it in future.

I'll point out that I didn't look at my big mess of a garage and think 'right, I'm going to sort this out'. Instead I meant to clear one small area, then thought 'oh maybe I'll move this cabinet' and then it snowballed into getting the racks put together and labelling the drawers. As is often the case, a little progress begets motivation.

In regards to the future floor-plan this photo shows the size of the 'dad cave' when the wall's knocked out.

On the other side of the racks I now have a good space for a home gym, at least for the summer months. I wall mounted an old TV and made it smart with a Roku stick. As an aside, I made the mistake of buying this TV for my grandmother to replace her super old one but she never did get the hang of it. There might be a lesson there to upgrade your tech in your later years before the struggle to learn new things begins. At least it's being used now.

I also put up an old mirror and plan to install a pull up bar I picked up as part of an ebay fitness lot which also included this bench:

The rest of my equipment currently sits next to the sofa. Partly because the garage is still a bit chilly in the evenings but partly because it offers the least resistance to getting started. If I'm watching something on tele with Abi, all I have to do is get up, take 5 steps and I can start lifting. Do that for half an hour a day, most days, and I should see some progress.

With a gym membership the hurdle is too high (for me): put on shoes and coat, pack gym clothes, get in car, drive to gym, get a locker, get changed and then stay for at least an hour to make it worth my while. Then there's the monthly subscription to consider.

I've also found that there's not a lot you can't do at home with a bench, barbell and dumbbells. This is my current routine, split into push, pull and legs days. Often I'll split the push day into two so it never takes more than half an hour to complete. Very doable.

So I think this might be the key for me. Progress comes from consistency. Consistency comes from simplifying and removing the hurdles and barriers in front of you :)

Anyway, this brings me to March's fitness update which marks 3 months since I started my health commitment. I've continued to weigh myself daily:

It doesn't tell the whole story as the starting weight happened to be a big drop from the day before. My lowest weight in Feb was 165.6 lbs so it's more like a 4.6 lb loss, which I'm delighted with. However, much of March felt like a plateau which I've only just managed to break through. It's getting tougher!

What's the goal? It's pretty vague but I'd like to get to the middle of the healthy BMI range for my height which would be 157 lbs. I'll take any month to month improvement though. The best thing to have happened so far is the lower back pain I was dealing with has greatly diminished. Could be due to time, diet, less DIY, the resistance training...or the fact that I'm carrying around nearly 9kg less than before 👈.

👋

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