#OperationSwingACat – Garage Conversion Project

Since the turn of the new year I’ve been working almost exclusively from home and recently came to the conclusion that the spare bedroom / home office / man cave / studio is seriously cramping my style.

This being a modern house, the spare bedroom in which I reside is basically cupboard sized and I’m currently spending upwards of 15 hours a day in here surrounded by computer, camera and vaping gear with no real room to use any of it.

Producing a 10 minute e-cig review these days involves emptying gear onto the landing, half an an hour of lumping stuff around, finding and connecting batteries and cables (and putting it all back again afterwards) before thinking about the filming and editing process. This in no small part explains the lack of activity on this blog for long periods – its simply too much of a PITA to do very often.

So, a little while ago, I hatched a cunning plan to convert my garage into an office / studio. It wouldn’t be the biggest “studio” in the world of course, but at least there could be a space to leave a camera set up on a tripod for example, and a dedicated area for table-top reviews with lighting and no need to move furniture each time I want to film something.

It’s not totally ideal, but would at least afford me the space to separate my business junk from my hobbyist junk and hopefully make both a bit more productive. To seal the deal with SWMBO, I also agreed to convert the vacated cupboard into a Gym and so the process of gathering estimates began. This process is now complete, contractors have been contracted and dates are being agreed which brings me right up to the realisation that I have to actually do stuff, hard stuff and pretty quickly.

Now, I suspect that I’m not the only person in the world that has been using their garage as a “less than optimally organised” storage facility, but knowing this doesn’t make the task ahead any less daunting. I have a relatively short time to dump, sell or relocate 16 years worth of accumulated junk starting, well – right now!

So to that end, this project that will ultimately make the Hoover Dam and the Panama Ship Canal look like odd-jobs, started when I managed to find a shed that wedges between the house and the neighbours’ fence and it arrived yesterday.

Into the aforementioned shed I have moved the bikes (the ones we’re keeping anyway), car bike-rack and my Supernova sails along with a couple of other bits and bobs. It’s an encouraging start, but there’s a hell of a lot of stuff yet to shift.

Anyhow, I thought I might keep a blog (and vlog) of how this all pans out, so I’ve started a Youtube playlist:

I’ll try and keep it updated as I go along, and maybe you can laugh at some of my pain!