Moving Into the Colorado Shop

We are finally getting settled in Colorado so I thought it would be nice to do a little shop update. I strategically staggered the move so that the shop tools would arrive about a week after the house boxes arrived. My hope was that I’d have enough time to get the family settled as well as prep the garage space for the deluge of boxes and tools that were headed its way. As it turns out, I probably could have used an extra week. Either way, the tools arrived without incident and I had them clustered in the center of the shop, allowing me room to walk around the perimeter during the settling in phase.

Out With the Old!

One of the first things I did in the space, somewhat regretfully, was remove two banks of large storage cabinets. If I were using this as a parking garage, I’d be stoked to have so much storage. But at this point, space is more important than bulk storage and the oversized shelves in these cabinets aren’t really the kind of storage a woodworker needs (at least not THIS woodworker). So the cabinets were taken down and they will either wind up being installed in someone else’s garage or recycled into some other shop furniture.

Unpacking Sucks

When packing up the shop in AZ, I was very surprised at how much stuff I had to put into boxes. Consequently on the other side, I’m feeling the pain. At this stage, I simply don’t have enough drawers and cabinets to put everything away nor do I have any wall-hanging storage beyond the few pegboard walls set up by the previous homeowner. But I have to make progress somehow so I pretty much loaded up the cabinets and drawers with anything and everything that will fit. I’ll organize later.

Tool Locations

The ultimate goal at this stage is to reduce the amount of clutter on the floor so that I can start moving tools to their proposed locations. To help with this part of the process I quickly sketched a rough drawing of the shop and where I think the tools should go. It’s all about compromise. I can try to organize the tools into a sensible workflow but sometimes the space dictates something different. So I’ll do the best I can within the confines of the space. What I have below will get me to a starting point and the actual shop itself will fill in the blanks in terms of what’s wrong with the layout.