Shop Redesign: Lumber Rack

It has been several months since my last post, and I feel pretty bad about not providing any updates, much less videos, in the last few months.  Life, and then weather, unfortunately happened.

As some of you may have seen, my new video went up today!

 

While there's not much going on in the video, it represents the first major step in my shop redesign!

I work in an uninsulated one-car garage here in the Phoenix valley, and as the summers keep getting hotter, it's more important than ever for me to find ways to maximize my efficiency, as my available working time gets shorter.  The layout I had previously was crowded, and required a lot of moving things around in order to change work functions.  I just don't have time for that!  I've been looking through articles, blog posts, videos, and more just to try to garner some ideas of how to work effectively within the confines of my shop.

About a year ago, I stumbled across this article from Fine Woodworking about the Smart Shop in a One-Car Garage.  It's an older post, but it happens that this just about perfectly matches the dimensions of my work space.  There are some changes that I needed to make, as I don't have the resources to drop new electrical lines into the garage, nor do I have an open ceiling allowing for overhead lumber storage.

Also around this time, Wood Magazine was finishing up their Idea Shop 6 series.  Between these two resources, I was able to piece together a good plan of attack for my place!

I've started by replacing my old lumber rack.  This beast was fantastic, but really took up all the best real-estate on that wall.

The Behemoth!

By moving to this new design, I've freed up a lot of floor and wall space.

Loaded up!

Wall detail

It's not really clear, but I now have about five feet of usable wall space below the new racks.  The downside is that I don't have dedicated storage for sheet goods in the shop any more.  However, I happen to have an amazing wife who allowed me to move the old rack into our two-car garage (that we actually use to park the cars in!).  This lets me store sheet goods, and lumber for upcoming projects that still needs to reach equilibrium.  Ideally, I will have material for active and next project on the rack in the shop, and material for the next two to three projects in the garage.  We'll see if I can stick to that!

That's about all for this post.  The next major project is going to be a table system for my radial arm saw.  With luck, that'll be done in a couple of weeks!