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This page has been updated since its original posting. While rummaging through our photographs I discovered several photos from my fourth shop where previously I thought only one had survived the move. Click here to go directly to the updated material, or simply scroll down to peruse the entire article.
Right now I am completing work on my sixth shop in nearly twenty years of woodworking. I suppose to be accurate, I would have to say seventh. My Dad's shop was really my first shop. He worked out of a one car garage where on long wall was lined with a very large radial arm saw bench and a woodpile. The rest of the garage was filled with the ubiquitous storage items. Inside the bench were a fairly complete set of power tools and hand tools, but there was no real bench in the whole place. That was what the Work-Mate was for I suppose.
He was not a cabinetmaker or a carpenter, though he would have made a fine addition to either of those trades. He is very artistic and resourceful, so he can usually think of a number of ways to accomplish the task at hand. I never managed to refine anything of a style in his shop, but everything I built for the first three of fours years was in that shop.
Being somewhat independent, there came a time when I could no longer live with having to drive across town to borrow a workshop. My wife, fortunately, was very supportive as well. She began purchasing me tools for birthdays and Christmas and before too long I set up shop in a room in the basement of our two bedroom, rented house. The space wasn't very large, only around 100 square feet, but I managed to knock together a work table out of 4 by 4 stock and some left over plywood. Then I set to work with my little table, a Work-Mate, and my little collection of tools.
There are many reasons why that space didn't work out. Three really stick out in my mind. First, the space was really small. I was at the bottom of a rickety old set of narrow, steep stairs so getting materials down there was a real chore. Second, the room was right by the furnace. In those days, dust collectors weren't something that small shops had. All we had were shovels and brooms. The dust factor was too much for the furnace and managed to get spread throughout the entire house. Third, the room next to my shop was my darkroom. If you know anything about photography, you know that dust is not compatible with it.
Also, about that same time I was beginning to realize that if I wanted to progress in my woodworking I was going to have to invest in some sort of machine to assist me in producing more accurate and quicker cuts. Dad had the radial arm saw, but then there were tablesaws. I did quite a bit of research and decided upon a belt driven, cast iron, one and a half horsepower Craftsman contractor's saw. I did not relish the thought of trying to get it downstairs, so I decided to move the shop to the garage.
We had a one car garage with insulation and drywall, and a non-functioning furnace - unfortunately. Thus was born my second shop. It had built in workbenches and shelving which made the transition even nicer. It was, however, unusable in our Alberta winters. Little thought was given to shop layout at the time because all I had was the saw. Very simple.
Eventually we had to move out of that house and rented another, this time with a two car garage. Unfortunately my third shop was an uninsulated shell, also unusable in winter. However, my woodworking skills and tool inventory grew by leaps and bounds in the years we spent in that house. Not too long after moving there, the New Yankee Workshop began its first season. Being from Western Canada, I had never seen anything like the cabinetmaker's bench that he had. When he proceeded to make a version of it in the second episode it wasn't long before I decided to make one for myself. I am still using it and proud to show it off, scars and all.
Those years were spent working wood without much thought to shop organization. You will see that after some time the shop was transformed through the addition of new machinery and shop fixtures. By the time we moved out, more changes were evident with the addition of a bandsaw (for which I sold my boat) and some built-in cabinets. This evolution of my third shop is one of which I had taken a picture. The changes over time were not really planned but all grew out of need and trying to arrange things so that I could, for example, build an entire kitchen full of cabinets and still have room to move around and work. I learned a lot about the process of woodworking in this shop.
Eventually, we bought a house. I made sure that it came with a two car, heated, insulated garage before I would even look at it. In fact, whoever owned the house before us must have been a woodworker because the wiring was impeccable, with two 220V circuits and heavy duty 110V circuits every few feet around the perimeter. The time was spring 1993 and I also treated myself to a new Unisaw with a full size Commercial Biesemeyer fence, a dust collector, and a few other odds and ends. I spent a great deal of time working on the layout for this, my fourth shop. If you compare the early and late versions you will see that the only real changes I made were to decrease the number of cabinets and other things taking up floor space. That has been the one major theme in all my shops, maximizing space to assemble and store projects before they leave the shop. You will see that it was also a time of infatuation with pegboard.
For the first time I had a year round shop and I made good use of the time in it. I had never been able to work wood in the winter months (I tried in my third shop using a Kerosene heater and got pneumonia) so it was a feature that I really enjoyed. It was also a time where I decided that perhaps less was more. What I mean by this is that you can have too many floor model machines and cabinets. You can have too many electric motors and sets of bearings to repair and service. And you can have too much money invested in machines. I worked to create my own methodology: just because there are twenty ways to do something doesn't mean you have to have the tools to be able to do ALL twenty.
Update: Without further ado, I'll just get right to the descriptions of the newly discovered photos, since trying to write something in context here would be too difficult.
The first two photos show the shop in the very early days of development. They show the left and right views of the shop. This next shot is midway though the development of the fourth shop. It is kind of dark, but you get a general idea of layout. Although dark, the next picture shows my clamp storage area, which was close to the bench area for ease of access. I like to use the wall for clamps because another moving cart or furniture obstacle is too much of a pain. Wall storage was accomplished with a simple pair of plywood shelves running the length of one wall. Although I didn't find a picture of it, my hardwood supply would be seen if you could just pan to the right in that shot. One question oft asked in rec.woodworking is, "how do I insulate an overhead garage door?" This is how I accomplished that goal. The white styrofoam was simply friction fit between the ribs of the door, but the perimeter was completely wrapped in pink fibreglass and covered in plastic for drafts. I even sandwiched pink fibreglass in plastic under the door. Of course that shop was in North-Central Alberta where most of the 5 month winter was at -20 Celcius or lower. Here is a shot of the storage under the wall bench where I kept a plethora of power tools. Finally, my yellow bins. You can never have enough hardware lying around, and never use the screws that come with whatever you are installing - Murphy's Law says they are garbage!
In 1997 we moved to the United States. I brought EVERYTHING with me, but it remained in storage for some months until I found some inexpensive shop space in Maryland, my fifth shop. This time I got all the space I always thought I wanted. At over 1000 square feet, with a separate finishing room and office (that I constructed myself), I had it all. Or did I? I discovered that having that much space not only do you have to pay to heat and light it, you also have to pay that much extra to duct in your dust collection and pipe your compressed air, which I never actually finished. I was a major chore just to set up to the point that I could use it. Finally, you have to spend that much more time CLEANING it. To add insult to whatever, it was 30 minutes from my home, in good traffic, and had no bathroom facilities (I had to buy a portable toilet). It didn't take very long to realize that smaller is better in my opinion. However, it was better than no shop, and I had a great time with it too. Still you can see from the diagram that my methodology has had an effect on the layout of the shop, as well as its size and shape. Here is a panorama shot from the nearly complete shop.
In 2000, we built a house and I am completing my sixth shop. Wow, I hope there aren't going to be too many more. This time I am using that Easy Shop layout program. I tried to use it for my last shop but it won't handle a space that size. Before that, it hadn't even been written. I have been dying to try it out for real since I first found out about it, so at least I can get some use out of it now. But you can read about what I am doing in that shop in another story.
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