Home Gym in Life in General

Yesterday I spent the ENTIRE day working on my garage. Embarrassingly, we still haven’t technically unpacked and hung everything up in the house. Jessica has been hard at work with studying for her pharmacy licensing exam and when I’m not super busy making vertical videos for strangers on the internet, I’m just super tired/lazy.

But yesterday I finally just said “okay home gym is about to happen, I gotta get that garage done”. So after waking up at 7am I just got to work. The first thing I needed to tackle was the giant pile of crap that was just sitting on one side of the garage.

The original plan was to use these shelves my mother-in-law promised us when moving into the house. But after actually getting the shelves, I realized they are really small. They can hold small things, like some tools and whatnot, but I thought they’d be big enough to hold like moving boxes. I remember them having large shelves in their old house but I think those may have built into the garage.

So I went to Lowe’s and bought the biggest shelf they had. Only after I got to my car did I consider whether or not it would actually fit haha (plus this box actually weighed 160 pounds and I was doing this on my own). But after laying the back seats down, the box extended all the way to the passenger seat and I was able to close the hatch (but I was def planning to just leave the hatch open and drive slowly home).

Anyway it took a while to build, but I was about to finish building the shelf when I realized the final piece had a fault in the weld that wouldn’t let me snap it to the frame. I was NOT about to disassemble this entire shelf and try to shove it back into this IKEA style box so I could get one piece swapped out. I figure I can just take the faulty piece back, open a new box at the store, swap it out, and return that one instead.

But the people at the store were WAY too confused at this concept. I was like “listen… if I go home, disassemble the shelf, bring it in and leave with a new box… the end result is the same as if I just take the one piece I need and return this box instead. Except the box won’t be shredded like the one I have at home, and I won’t have to disassemble my shelf… EVERYONE WINS”

Finally the Lowe’s general manager shows up and is like “yeah that’s totally fine go ahead” THANK CHRIST SOMEONE WITH REASON.

Anyway, after I got the shelf built then started the very long process of getting the garage organized. I had to decide where the shelf would go where it wouldn’t interfere with the garage door opener, then decide where the gym was going to go.

Originally I was going to split the home gym into two sections but after reconsidering, I decided that I would rather have my work bench near the only electrical socket in the garage and just put the gym alongside one wall in the garage together. Only issue was that I ordered a gym floor mat in two pieces and was worried they wouldn’t look seamless if I stuck them together. But the place I ordered from clearly has really good manufacturing tolerances because they fit together PERFECTLY and looked like one large floor mat instead.

Now the gym itself was WILD to put together. They shipped basically every piece in its own box. Just opening the boxes and breaking them down for recycling was a chore in itself. Also the bars they shipped were in these really crazy thick tubes (think pillsbury biscuit tubes but like 10 times thicker and basically impossible to open) and it took me so long how to figure out how to open them haha.

Anyway, the squat rack was actually super simple to assemble. It was just 5 pieces with two brackets holding them all together. I bought a new socket set (the one I’ve had for 6 or 7 years is missing way too many pieces lol) but unfortunately the bolts for the squat rack were a little too large so I had to make do with a pair of pliers but I managed to get a good enough grip on the bolts without chewing them up too much. Took me like 15 minutes to get it together, no problem.

But the bench.... OMG this thing had like 30 different pieces and like 1 billion bolts and screws and random little pieces. Not to mention the basically unreadable assembly instructions haha. Took me like 2 hours to figure that one out. But once I got it together, all that was left was the weight rack and unboxing all the weights.

One problem I noticed is that the weights I ordered don’t have grip handles or anything, which is fine but the plate tree I bought to hold them is angled, so gripping the plates to slide them off the tree is kind of a pain actually. If it’s a problem, I may just sell it and get a vertical tree instead (where it holds them more horizontally so they just slide off easily).

But anyway, that’s all I could do for now! I have a cable machine ordered and that’s supposed to arrive on Monday and on Tuesday a smaller package of weigh collars I ordered (which I forgot to order) will arrive, and then I’ll be set (oh and I’m looking into a couple of mirrors I can hang on the wall). I think I may need a couple more little things here and there but the bulk of it will be here. Then I can finally live my dream of just walking downstairs and working out in JEANS. I HATE wearing workout clothes. idk what material they make them out of, but it’s like nails on a chalkboard for me.

Anyway I’ll attach of a photo the bench (and you can see my work area in the back haha. a bit of a mess rn.

Well anyway that’s my life ,just in a super dad-mode currently.

Write again soon!

Last updated October 06, 2022