Shop Clean Up
Entered: 2009-12-30
Edited: 2009-12-30
Type: workshop

It's been a while since I've turned any serious attention to organizing the shop and I have a couple of wood working projects lined up to improve my storage but my first step was a major clean up and reorg that has been desperately needed for about a year but was put off in favor of projects for the house. Now that the coffee table build is wrapped up I'm finally making the time to get the shop in order - I simply can't work efficiently in the current setup.

The first step was to reduce the clutter and give the place an overall good cleaning. My shop, aka garage does triple duty as a work shop, laundry room and general storage shed. It's also our primary ingress and egress path to the house and is a vital thruway when loading Becca's band's equipment. To accommodate all these uses it needs to stay tidy and be well organized. To that end I spent a couple full days working on the clean up. I ordered nifty bike holders to get the two good bikes out of the way, Becca's Raleigh is hanging in the garage, my Specialized is hanging in my office (home office, not at work) and her cheapo bike is upside down sans front tire until we can sell/donate it. A bunch of random crap has been put away or thrown away, I put an unused set of cheap plastic drawers under my little bench, pushed it to the other side of the shop to some newly open space removed an old vice rigged up out of pipe clamps and turned it round the other way to make the remaining vice actually useful. I also shop vacced up a ton of saw dust, plane shavings and other crap. The main walkway through the shop is now a good 7' wide and easy to get through and the layout is better for woodworking on my big bench and I have better lighting on the little bench now too since it's closer to where my lights are. I took some before and after photo's and stitched them together in the Gimp:

Before

• Bacon! - 2010-08-28
• Dork Lamp - 2010-07-31
• Saucisson Sec - 2010-05-13
• Strawberry Jam - 2010-05-08
• Multi-Media - 2010-03-05
• Bottle Cutting Part 2 - 2010-02-16
• Perrier Bottle Glasses - 2010-02-14
• I need some bagels - 2010-01-17
• Pizza! - 2010-01-16
• Saturday Afternoon Smoke - 2010-01-16
• Sparky stuff - 2010-01-13
• Gizmos! - 2010-01-05
• Shop Clean Up - 2009-12-30
• About this workshop blog - 2009-12-29