Even before we moved into our house, I had been planning an area to be my workshop. I wanted a place that was organized, comfortable and had the space for me to work on projects big and small. Everything is against one wall or on wheels so they can be moved against the wall to help conserve space. It felt good to have built a lot of the things myself (with some assistance from a little helper) including the workbench, carts and some of the shelving.

While the Kapex isn’t a large compound sliding mitre saw, having it on my workbench effectively took up most of the available work surface so I’ve been wanting to build some kind of miter station for it. Originally I thought about building a mobile mitre station, but after some thought decided to just build a stationary one next to the workbench at the same height so the workbench can double as a work piece support extension.

I have a list of woodworking projects that I’ve been wanting to do and last weekend I planned on completing a couple of them. My work area is in the garage and shares space with the car. To do any work requires that I back the car out and setup my tools each time. This isn’t a big problem as most of time since I have most of my tools on mobile carts and setup time is minimal.

My “workshop” is, like many people, in the garage and one stipulation from She Who Must Be Obeyed for letting me indulge in my hobby is that the garage must still be able to function for its intended purpose for at least one car. That means being able to move stuff around and out of the way. While the MFT/3 is not super heavy, it doesn’t motivate me to want to me to move it.

After using a lot of make shift router tables to build my shoe cabinet, I decided to buy a router table. Router tables are very versatile and woodworkers often build their own (much like building a workbench is a rite of passage), but this time I decided that I’d rather just buy one and use my time on building other things instead. Instead of a full size router table, I went with a portable benchtop model because my space is limited so I went with the Benchdog contractor’s table.

Ikea, mostly known for its modern Scandinavian design particle board furniture, also sells some solid wood products such as counter tops and table tops. They aren’t expensive hardwoods but cheaper woods such as pine and beech, but if you don’t have the equipment or time to mill your own stock (thickness planer, jointer, etc.) and laminate them together then Ikea might be an alternative. That was my thinking since I wanted to have wood table in the office that can take some abuse, but I don’t have the equipment to do it from rough stock.

The July 4th weekend gave me a chance to tackle organizing the garage. It is a 2-cars garage and it was important for us to be able to park at least one car in and not use everything for storage and the workshop. After some research, I went with the RubberMaid FastTrack system for the walls since they aren’t too expensive and can be installed by one person. This is the “parking” side of the garage.

I had promised that once we have completed the house that I would build a sandbox in the backyard. A sandbox is pretty easy to build since it’s essentially a box. A few things to consider when building a sandbox is whether there are cats and other animals around since you don’t want your child’s sandbox to become an oversized litter box. Because there are cats in our neighborhood, I knew we needed to have a lid of some sort for the sandbox.

Here are some pictures of my mobile sheet cart all loaded up. It works really well and freed up a ton of space in my garage and I’ve been able to roll the cart around the garage myself. Here is the side for larger sheet goods: The middle part is used for holding lumber with the top using as a shelf: This side is for holding misc sized parts and dowel rods:

Much to the dismay of my wife, my woodworking hobby resulted in our garage getting filled with plywood, wood and scraps from the different projects. One of our shelves was inaccessible since it was blocked by full sheets of plywood, and my wing chun stand became a spot for random pieces of wood to lean against. The walnut that I had were stacked under one table and was hard to sort through and the weight of everything discouraged me from moving any of it.