Spring Cleaning - Garage gets a Makeover

I don't know how many of you have ever installed about 2,000 sq. feet worth of laminate flooring, but if you have you'll understand just how much sawdust this creates. We had the saws in our garage for light/shade while we worked, so up until this weekend, our garage has been filled with sawdust. So. Much. Sawdust. Sawdust on the work table:

Sawdust on the floor:

Even on the kitchen sink (lol, yes, we've got everything AND the kitchen sink in our garage):

Sawdust on the stuff we put in the garage for storage (see that furniture? I'll get to it later in this post):

Now that our floors are done it was time for the reign of sawdust to end. I got sick of walking into the garage to find something and getting instantly dirty/start to sneeze. So, this past Saturday I grabbed a shop-vac and went at it. If you don't know what a shop vac is, it's a heavy duty vacuum cleaner used in wood shops, etc.  They're like $100 minimum (thought I just borrowed one for free!).

It took multiple hours, but I painstakingly used a broom and shop vac to remove every little bit of the sawdust. See? No more sawdust on the work bench!

I even semi-organized the tools. I need to spend some serious time organizing them later, but for not at least I can see them all:

I vacuumed everything, even the lawnmower:

Looks SO much better! (And vacuuming everything clean kind of made the OCD monster in me very very happy).

Now, besides the need to be able to walk into my garage without sneezing, my other reason for cleaning the garage was so that I can start working on my next project: refinishing a dresser and night stand for the nursery! My mother in law found these at a thrift store and we snatched them up. They're nice solid pieces of furniture, and I think with a little love and paint, I can turn this into something perfect for the nursery. I plan to put a changing pad on top and using this dresser for the changing table.

The middle part opens to reveal three mini drawers, perfect for extra diapers and changing supplies.

And it came with one matching end table,which we'll probably put next to the rocking chair, giving us a place to put down the bottle after our little one has fallen asleep. 

I'm excited about transforming these pieces, and I want to make sure I do it correctly, so I've done some research and I'll be blogging about how it's done. This one is going to have a lot more steps than 'prime then paint'. Can't wait to get started!