With the kitchen remodel out of the way, it’s now time to turn my attentions to the workshop and tools, languishing since Katrina.
Basement Layout
The house we bought has an unfinished basement which I claimed as a workshop. This has taken some getting used to because there is no natural light and it shares the space with all the mechanical equipment for the house. It is also significantly smaller than the space I’m used to working, but it’s bigger than the tin shed I had way back when we lived in Metairie. So particular focus has been spent on maximizing space utilization.
When I tore the old cabinets out of the kitchen I knew I wanted to be able to use them again and putting them in the basement space seemed ideal. I got about 90% of the cabinets installed against the outside wall for a lot of storage. This allowed me to start unpacking boxes of stuff from the garage in Slidell some of which I hadn’t seen in nearly 3 years.
Of course I modeled the whole thing in SketchUp and this is what the workshop will look like…
You can see the cabinets on the back wall and the placement of the tablesaw on the left and the band saw and thickness planer on the right. The new Makita Sliding Compound Miter Saw from Tyler Tool is on the cabinet and further along the wall is the jointer-planer.
Looking at it from another angle shows the layout more clearly;
Getting all that done, now the focus was getting the tools whose stands all perished in the flood workable again.
Table Saw
In a previous post I talked about the stand I wanted to build for the table saw I foresaw a problem in limited means to cut sheet material, so I had designed the base primarily out of dimensional lumber. Taking the opportunity to utilize my new SketchUp skills, I migrated that design into SketchUp.
If you remember, it looked like:
I even went so far as to buy all the dimensional lumber, but I just couldn’t bring myself to build this. Don’t know why. Last summer, I built a TV stand out of plywood for the house in Ashburn using nothing more than a circular saw, jig saw and a belt sander. Not to pat myself on the back, it turned out pretty good. If I could cut the plywood for that, I could certainly cut plywood for a table saw stand. I decided to fall back to my original design (made from MDF, ugh) but made even more modular.
What I came up looks like this:
This is much more to my liking, and it will be transportable if need be. It’s made up of four boxes (two of which are identical) that I will bolt together using through fasteners. Simple yet effective and much nicer looking.
Only now what do I do with all the 2 X 4’s I bought?????
Dang. Maybe I’ll give them to Habitat for Humanity with the rest of the kitchen appliances.
Stay tuned for the jointer and thickness planer stands!!
chris