When I started building, I had nowhere to work except my parents’ garage. Garages are perfectly suitable for using as a workshop, but I live in Michigan. The weather is all over the place and it’s snowing almost half of the year.
I was working in the garage while it was downpouring.
Working during blizzards and ice storms.
And working in a winter coat because it was 15 to 20 degrees.
Or steaming up my mask and safety glasses when it was over 100 degrees.
Plus, cleaning the garage every time so I could bring the cars back in took a lot of time away from actually building.
I’m glad that I had a place to work, but let’s just say an indoor workshop was definitely on my wishlist for the future.
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Before & After
It’s hard to imagine that this used to be a guest bedroom, but that’s what it was. I certainly wouldn’t want to sleep in the basement with the spiders, but apparently someone has before.
It looks a lot different now with the bed out and the tools in.
Of course, it took a bit of work to get there. I had tools and tool stands to assemble, workbenches to build, and metal pegboards to hang.
Carrying a bandsaw and dust collector down the basement stairs is not an easy task either.
Then there were boxes and boxes full of tools and parts to bring in and find places for.
A place for everything
Working in a small space is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s all about how you use the space. Before converting the room into a workshop, I took measurements and planned out how everything would fit into the room.
Here’s a screenshot of my shop layout that I made on Grizzly’s workshop planner while I was waiting to close on the house. This is a really cool tool to use and it might even help you rearrange your space for a more productive work area.
Some of the tools are pretty big, so is the dust collector and so are the workbenches. I hadn’t made the workbenches yet, but I had plans, drawings, and measurements.
The bigger tools are each on a tool stand with a locking mobile base. I keep them against this wall when they’re not in use.
Getting them out to the open space in the middle of the room is kind of like playing that slider game from when I was a kid. It’d be nice to have a station for each tool without having to move anything, but this works just fine.
Why are my workbenches so narrow?
I designed my workbenches based on what I was looking for in a workspace for exactly what I was going to be doing on it – building guitars.
The benches are a little wider than the width of a standard guitar or bass body. There’s a lot of clamping going on in guitar building and I was always frustrated using a wider workbench and only being able to get clamps on one side. The narrow benches allow me to get clamps on both sides, or any combination of three sides if I’m working down at the end of the bench.
If I ever need a wider workbench, I can just slide two of them next to each other.
Layout
I don’t remember where the idea came from for the workbench layout, but the general idea is that I am standing in the middle of the benches the majority of the time that I’m working. The bench on the left sticks out as a peninsula so that I have access for the clamps as mentioned above.
This bench being a peninsula also allows me to be able to walk around to the other side if I need to get at something from a different angle.
Make a quarter turn and you have another bench, along with a wall of tools hanging on my pegboard.
Another quarter turn was originally supposed to be a stand for my lathe, and someday it probably will be. For now, it’s where I set down my router, angle grinder, random orbital sander, etc and some of the bigger wood cutoffs. Oh yeah, and clamps.
The last bench is a stand for my drill press, which was previously on the floor and kind of a pain to use. Now it’s at the perfect height and in a really convenient location. It sticks into my U shape layout simply because of the depth of the drill press.
My dust collector and Dust Deputy are along the wall on the other side of the drill press so they’re never far from where I need them. Someday I will arrange the dust collector hose(s) more professionally, but for now, it’s used more like a vacuum except for the times when the hose is plugged directly into one of the larger tools that has a dust port (bandsaw, jointer, or planer).
I also have a workshop air filter behind my drill press. Normally you would hang these from the ceiling, but my ceilings are low, so even I, at 5’4”, would probably be banging my head on it if I hung it. This filters out the fine dust particles in the air and makes the air safer to breathe. Even with the dust collector and filter, I still wear a dust mask while working.
Wood & finish
I store the wood and finishing products/tools in a separate room so that they are out of the way and not getting constantly covered in sawdust.
I spray or wipe the finish in that other room as well for the same reasons.
The way I hang the instruments when I finish them needed an upgrade, so I worked on that recently. I’ll write about it in the next blog.
How about you?
How does your workshop look? What was the most important part of your setup? Let me know in the comments below.
