Renovate Australia

I’m visiting a mate at the moment who wants to turn the huge shed on their property into the “Ultimate Man Cave”…

The shed is 45’ x 20’ high with  13’ ceilings (13.5 metres x 6 metres with 4 metre ceilings). In addition that that area there is also an annex at the back that is used for storage and will continue to be used as such.

They’ve had a good start with picking up gear for the man cave. So far they have acquired:

• Large Rear Projection TV
• Comfortable Couch
• Ping Pong Table
• Air Hockey Table
• Sportcraft 3-Point Throwdown Basketball Game

They’ve also got a line on a dart board and possibly a pool table. Of course I reckon no man cave is complete without proper man cave signs, which will probably need to be custom made (I reckon a man cave neon sign is a bit excessive, I prefer the wooden variety).

It’s a huge area to work with and really quite a dream space to work with. The walls are partially covered with plaster board / drywall. There is also ample power points in the shop and cable television has been run into the shop. The future man cave is within range of the wireless network from the house, although it might benefit from a wireless signal extender (like the Hawking HWREN1 Hi-Gain Wireless-300N Range Extender) mounted on the wall closest to the house. In one corner it looks like there has been some plumbing roughed in for a small bathroom / toilet.

We’ve been inspired with man cave ideas by sites like:

• PerfectManCave (www.perfectmancave.com) which has some great ideas
• The Art of Manliness which has a good article of 14 Famous Man Rooms (http://artofmanliness.com/2010/07/27/famous-man-caves/) I especially like Mark Twain’s Billiards Room

But we feel like we at a bit of an impasse with what to do in setting up such a large area as the ultimate man cave. So we wanted to as you …

If this was yours, what would you do to make this space into the ultimate man cave?

After a minor mishap that involved a slipped screw driver and a few extra holes while installing the shelf, we have finally finished and mounted the wall mounted photo shelf that our daughter is using as a bookshelf in her bedroom.

We described how we built the self in the Build a Wall Mounted Photo Shelf Article. Our daughter loves the shelf and quickly went to work putting as many books as she could on it.

So that it could hold as much weight as possible we mounted it directly into two wall studs using 2 inch wood screws. Unfortunately screwing it into the studs left it looking lopsided, so I put one screw on the right side of the shelf into a drywall anchor. We then covered up the end of the screws with white screw hole plugs that seemed to do the trick pretty well.

We placed the bookshelf at the head of our daughters Ikea Hemnes Daybed. Given the fact that the books are always in different places come the morning I can guess that she is using the book shelf a lot…

This last week I have been chatting a bit with Ethan over at One Project Closer. I’ve been following their web-site since 2008, shortly after they started the site. The site is written by two different couples who own three houses between them and are kept busy with the upkeep and renovations on those sites.

While chatting with Ethan he reminded me about a few coupon pages that they have. The pages are for Home Depot, Lowes and Sears and they are regularly updated with the most recent coupons.

• Home Depot Coupons
• Lowes Coupons
• Sears Coupons

There are some pretty decent coupons on there including some 10% off coupons, free shipping or delivery coupons, and many more.

My only complaint is that the coupons are only for Home Depot, Lowes and Sears in the USA. We have Home Depot and Sears in Canada, but the coupons aren’t valid here. Lowes should be coming soon to Western Canada, which is exciting, and if I’m lucky some of the coupons for Lowes will work when they open.

At the moment we have a rather large storage / mechanical / furnace room in the basement of our house here in Calgary, Canada. The room has our furnace, hot water tank, freezer and a lot of shelves in it. It is easily large enough to be changed to a storage / furnace room and another room that could be used as an office or study (the window is too small for a bedroom).

One of the concerns about that room is the width of the door. A door to a mechanical / furnace room need to be large enough to fit the hot water tank and furnace out of it without any problems. Currently the door is 30”, or 76cm wide, which is technically too small to meet code for a furnace room. The door should be 32”, or 82cm wide to allow proper access.

To further complicate matters, if we were to put the door to the mechanical / furnace room in the newly created office space both the door to the office AND the door to the utility room would need to be the full 32” / 82cm wide since the hot water tank and furnace would need to go through both rooms.

It’s kind of funny / annoying that moving in here we were told and thought that to add another room in that area would be easy, but we are very quickly realising that nothing is every as easy as it looks.