Step 1: Move all the lumber and other misc. materials. Then clean up the area and prepare for painting. I was hoping to be able to leave the existing stucco in place, but after I moved everything out of the way I determined that the stucco had pulled away from the wall in many places. Leaving that would just be giving bugs, moisture, and mold a safe place to live, so I began chipping away at the loose stucco. The picture below is just the beginning of the process.
After two days of removing stucco followed by two days of scrubbing with bleach and detergent, I was finally ready to start priming and painting. It's amazing the difference a fresh coat of paint can make.
The next step is going to be to install the top and bottom plate for the frame. Like the other wall project I did, I wanted to shim the bottom plate up off of the floor so that if water does come into the basement it will be able to flow under the frame and not soak into the wood. I depleted my store of metal shims on the other part of the wall, so I had to come up with something else. I decided that plastic would actually work better than metal since there was no chance of oxidizing, so I bought a plastic "board" 3-1/2" wide by 8' long and cut it into pieces to act as shims.
I threw together a quick jig on the drill press to drill the shims, and that was all there was to it.
Building the frame was actually the easiest part of the project. The only tedious part was using the plumb-bob to mark the floor for the shims and the bottom plate, the rest went pretty quickly.
Making and mounting the arms on the other hand was more tedious than I realized it would be. Two days of making the arms, mounting, and leveling.
In the end it was well worth the time and effort. And I was even able to shrink my lumber pile further as most of the pine boards and 2x4s used for the arms were left over from other projects or reclaimed scrap from old shelving.
I still need to wire up a light switch and add an overhead electrical outlet, but for the most part I am done. I might need to do some reorganizing of the lumber, but for now I was just happy to get most of it up off the floor and back where it belongs.
One last thing to point out in the picture below, the second row of arms from the bottom were designed to be at the same height as the top of the radial arm saw, and the first two arms on the right side of that row are 8 inches longer than the other arms on that level. This way if I ever need to cut a piece of board between 9 and 14 ft long on the radial arm saw it can rest on the ends of those two arms. That's not a common occurrence, but when it happens I'll be glad I planned ahead for it.
And of course, since I built the lumber racks, I had to build Courtney some shelves of her own, so we now have new laundry room shelves as well.
