My biggest shop upgrade in 19 years! How to turn any space into an awesome workshop.

I'm very excited about this store tour because it's the

biggest

change in 19

years

of working in this

space

. I started about six months ago. I began to reimagine my store and started from scratch to create my online course, the weekend work

shop

that I wanted. to put my whole woodworking philosophy to the test and prove that a small

space

is not only affordable and practical but also highly productive, above all, I want your work

shop

to be a space you love to be in a place where you can be eager to get in. a two car garage built in 1956 measures 19 feet by 19 feet is about 360 square feet slightly smaller than the average two car garage today like many shops mine slowly evolved organically and a bit haphazard gradually I bought new tools and I ran out of space for them.

I collected more and more materials and hardware, always convincing myself that, well, I could use that. It seems that someday all woodworkers tend to have some hoarding tendencies. and before you know it, a lot of that useful stuff will one day become messy, this affects workflow, your general well-being and can eventually lead to a loss of productivity, in the worst case, you may already don't enjoy going to your shop because you work in a mess it's so frustrating on the other end our new carpenters who want to set up a shop but don't think it's possible in a limited space and let's face it in the real world a lot of people need to share the space of the shop shop with bikes camping gear christmas decorations or worse yet a car my goal with the weekend shop was to put into practice all the lessons i learned over the

years

to help you transform your shop into a work space more thoughtful productive work and pointing you in the right direction if you're just starting out be sure to check out my three principles for getting the most out of your weekend shop shop emanates calm and yes, sharing a space with a car is definitely doable to start this transformation.

I stripped down, ripped my shop to its bones, and purged myself of the tools, workbenches, and materials I hardly ever used. It's time and honest with myself to determine what I really needed to be productive. to get the most out of a small shop is to put everything on wheels and i mean everything if it sits on the ground put it on wheels if you have to share the space with a car mobile shop furniture makes it very easy to push things against the wall when you're not using them and if you're lucky enough to have a dedicated store space like mine it's really nice to be able to rearrange furniture and try different workflows so what I'm going to do is walk you through my current arrangement and I show you the 14

workshop

projects that are in the weekend

workshop

course.

The main objective of my organization is to organize the tools in areas so as not to take many lost steps from one side to the other, one of the things that I love about this. store is that there is a lot of natural light besides the garage door I have this window that I installed years ago and then I have this door that also lets in a lot of light and what I did when I started to remodel my store is This time it is I finally got rid of my old fluorescent light fixtures and replaced them with all these LED light fixtures these are energy efficient and they are super bright each of these little four foot sections is 5,000 lumens of brightness and they all just plug together in any configuration you want although i have very good natural airflow in this store with the doors i thought it was important to install an air filtration unit so this one hangs on this ceiling and is very handy to use it comes with a remote for that you can

turn

it on this way, run it for an hour or so to completely eliminate all thinking, oh, you probably know by now that this is where my table saw normally lives.

I would like to be able to hook up to my vac shop from here to this s and that way I have the wood coming out this way I can use my basic mobile workbench as an out table if I need to so this is my basic work light bulb from the weekend carpenter's course that I use all the time and so it's so light and portable that I can work on something on my table saw and they just come here to store parts and assemble parts here I have some of my existing shop furniture this sliding door cabinet and then I've got my drill here.

I'm using this stand I made years ago and it's a little too tall for this, so I'm going to make a new stand for that drill press pretty soon. uncomfortable to work on this so tall these are some of my favorite projects from the weekend shop course and also two of my probably most time consuming not hard to do but there is a lot to them and of course this is the BMW Plus. It has the same design as the BMW, but with little depth added. drawers to store tools and of course cabinets or doors here to store whatever you want this can look really daunting it has 73 drawers but believe it or not its not that hard to do you just have to find your Zen and Spa when doing all those drawers and I still have a bunch of empty drawers here.

I don't know what I'm going to put, but it's for hardware. I have like nuts and bolts and all sorts of things in there and move over here this is the ignition course tool cabinet. I still use it a lot and this is where my regular BMW is usually parked when I'm not using it. I love this one. This is my mobile miter saw stand. It hardly takes up space but it has extension boards built in that way your wood is fully supported and I have extension fences built in so you can attach butt blocks to either side as you need and I added a drawer in here to store clamps or any accessories Like you have and down here I just have a bucket cut up that I found when I was using my miter saw a lot I would end up with little bits cut off and I was always trying to throw them away and that I'm horrible at basketball so I could never get them in there and then they just clump together so put a can there and here I've added a modular hand tool panel so what I did is I matched up all of my hand tools to really essential ones and this is a french cleat system so that I can change them whenever I need to have pliers a place for wrenches screwdrivers and whatever one of my founding principles is When I set up this shop it was to keep similar tools with similar tools, in other words I have a sanding station here where I can keep my most used power sanders.

I have a place for sandpaper for the random orbit sanders and then slots here for a hand sandpaper plus I have drawers for sanding blocks and accessories a drawer here for ev Also one of my

biggest

issues was having tools in different places on my workshop, it was just a lot of wasted energy running around trying to find stuff, so i have a drill and driver cabinet here that i finally have everything i need. for my drill and my driver and I have a place down here to store them as well as the chargers here. I've left this top empty because I like to take the bit out of my board and look through what I want here. than having to take this to wherever i'm working and get the bit out put it in and then i can slide it back into position ok out of all the projects in the weekend shop course this is my absolute favourite, I just love this project.

This is the practical half

turn

cart and it is made with half turn joints. It's a pretty good workout and there are almost a million uses for this little thing. know the safety team there for the s aw table so you just take it up to the saw when i want to use it and then put it back and of course right next to it. I have my drop down work center. This is one of my favorite designs I've come across. up I love having this it's kind of a complete base I love having some hardware in here and then I use it to set up my laptop when I'm looking at plans or just to set things up maybe as an assembly table and again a fair amount of drawers but not hard to make and move them this way i'm getting into some sort of lumber storage area of ​​my shop this is my mobile lumber cart that stores solid lumber in one and then has products cheap on the other side.

I initially designed this several years ago and for the weekend workshop I updated the plans and with all the new videos and made the build process so much easier, oh man did I build a lot of clamps. over the years and i think i finally got it right this time this all seems to be working great by the way this is a great storage space behind the door a lot of the time its kind of a spa you go through tall I've always liked having my naps in here this time to keep similar things with similar things I've included a box here to store my glue and a towel and a glue spreader so again everything they need to hold is all in one single place, this top tool holder is one of my favorite units to save space, so I have my disc and my strip sander. one side and just flip it over for my spindle sander.

I've included a drawer below to store additional sanding discs and other accessories for both tools. ago and I could feel it out of the store every time I needed to use it. I designed this wood wrap to be lightweight, easy to build, and you can fit the entire unit to the wall and I designed it to store eight feet long. boards that won't fit in my mobile lumber cart one of my ns design considerations on this unit was to keep it pretty shallow I don't want to store a lot of lumber in this I have to search and find what I need to make it spread out a bit off the wall this storage unit is the first project in the weekend workshop I wanted the first project to be a super easy one that you could do in an afternoon it's all made with dimensional lumber that you can pick up at Home Center and don't need to tearing any of the pieces apart, you won't need a table saw, you can use a miter saw to cut all the pieces to size and assemble them easily.

I call this the REO which really stands for who I am. store storage shelf organized and move in here is finishing corner I have a store utility sink and I have this cabinet that I also built years ago that stores some finishing stuff and here are my new spray paints for the course is this is a kinda silly fun project this is the last finish and basically i stock everything for finishing and i built a lazy susan that you can use on top so you have small projects you can finish them with spray lacquer and you don't have to move all the time time has storage for brushes, stir rods and in the front I have rollers for paper towels Kraft paper tape mineral spirits extra rags basically everything but the kitchen sink is on this last mobile finishing stand hope you enjoyed taking a look look at my 2020 workshop it's been a long time since 2001 it's a much simpler, cleaner and cleaner space It's brilliant now and it's one that allows me to actually be more productive I know where everything is at any time and I'm not so distracted by tools and materials and just other junk that just takes up space don't forget if you want to learn my three principles for getting the most out of it from your store and see the weekend workshop course and all it has to offer head over to the quiet weekend workshop it took me six months to create this course and over 40 years of experience to figure out what it should cover to help anyone to create their own woodworking sanctuary thanks for looking everyone