It's Alive! / What Hump?

It's long past time we got things rolling again here at Cycle Like a Stringer, so I thought I'd kick things off with the set up of my new workshop.  When we moved into our new home in Springfield last October, we had quite a few items, boxes, and assorted baby furniture that ended up in the basement.  Our previous house had a garage as well as an attic, whereas our current house has neither, so all of the things that had been stored in the attic and kept in the garage ended up piled in the basement of our new place.  Things have been pretty hectic with our family as we adjusted to our new life here, but as we finally began to feel settled, I decided it was time to get down into the basement and do some organizing...and, of course, set up the Tinkery.

First off, let me set the scene:  Our house is over 100 years old and has an unfinished basement.  The basement has very low ceilings, a thick layer of grime and dust over the floor, HVAC ducts that require one to stoop to pass under them, and the expected water leakage during heavy rainfall.  It's also very poorly lit and, as of right now, has no outdoor access - the bulkhead that leads to the backyard is sealed with a 3/4" slab of plywood.  Here's a blurry picture that I took with my phone just before I began organizing and rearranging:

After stacking and stowing the boxes that were to remain stored in the basement, I swept the floors as best I could and then went to work setting up my workshop in the middle of the main room that is shown above.  Just behind the four pillars in the center of the floor, I hung the tandem and my mountain bike on hooks from the first floor joists.  Next, I mounted peg board horizontally across the two front-most pillars, and another peg board vertically across the left-most pillars.  I moved my workbench in front of the horizontally-hung peg board and hung my tools up as needed.  Then I hung my spare bike parts on the vertically mounted peg board.  Once my tools and spare parts were organized, I set up the repair stand, clamped my latest project bike into it, and took these pictures:

 

It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was.  And more importantly, I now have a near fully functional Tinkery again.  There's still a fair amount of work to be done, but the hardest of it is finished.  I'm pretty happy with the result, too.  Even though it's dank, dusty, smelly, and leaky, I'm looking forward to spending a lot more time in the basement working on my next project.  More on that to come.  In the meantime, I'll just say that Ginger and I are super excited about living and cycling in Springfield, MO and becoming a voice in the local bicycling community.