Tape and Misc Stuff Organizer

I live in a house with a three car garage. I’ve already built out the two car side of the garage and now am starting to work on the single car side. I’ve already built out much of it and now I’m catching up on the video editing – which is why I’m wearing shorts in winter. The space includes an L-shaped bench with 17 drawers and 3 cabinets – a chisel rack, and more space for miscellaneous hand tools including leathercraft, carving, and metal working tools. I also built an elevated table that serves dual purpose to hold bench top tools and house my welding cart.

As you can see, I’m building out the back portion of the two car garage. This space backs up to my hand tool chest and plane till. I need to build out part of the area to bring all three cabinets flush with each other so that it will accept a piece of plywood.

I use simple pocket hole joinery to create a frame in order to bring the bottom cabinet flush with the top.

Once the cabinet back is framed out, I measure and cut a piece of plywood on my table saw and then rip it to size using a circular saw.

Now with the piece of birch plywood cut I’m able to attach it with 16 gauge brad nails.

So the next step is to secure the rolling tool box to the side of the cabinets and create a solid base. I bought this husky toolbox on a Christmas sale and got both top and bottom for $350. This is not much more than it would cost me to build a cabinet out of plywood and purchasing the equivalent number of drawer slides. Some of the strategy here is to generate more divided spaces so that I can use both sides of the walls as storage or work space. I never move the toolbox so securing it in place eliminates the hiding place for pencils, black widows and small screws.

So now that I have the basic architecture in place for the build-out, I attach another piece of plywood to create a solid and usable back for the tool box and to create two divided spaces.

In my quest for near perfect organization, I’m looking for quick visual access to frequently used tools and materials. This will become a tape and sanding disk organizer that sits above the toolbox.

After laying out the spacing for the storage space, I cut loads of 3/8 inch dowels to size. I use a table saw sled so that I can get repeatable cuts. I find this much easier than the chop saw for little pieces. Once the dowels are cut, I round over the edge on one of my sanding drums.

In a fairly short period of time I have three new organizers. I find it wildly satisfying to put tools in their proper place. I once had a drawer dedicated to this stuff and now this frees up another drawer to cram full of flea market purchases and impulse buys.