Thinking about space and workshops
When we moved to our current house I thought the basement was huge and would be a great place to work. 4 years later and feels crowded and out of control. For the past 6 months I've been thinking about different solutions to that problem.
My initial thoughts were to build a second building in our backyard. My original design was a garage because this seemed like it would make the most sense for house resale and I liked the roof top deck:
Christine was understandably upset about me taking over one third of the yard. The project would also be very expensive, and I wasn't sure that a garage was necessarily the best shape.
Version 2 of this plan was still an outbuilding, but one with a smaller footprint and higher ceilings. The tall ceilings would give me plenty of storage (hanging bicycles from the ceiling) and the footprint would be large enough for me needs. It wouldn't be huge, but it would be okay. That plan looked like this (in cut-away fashion):
Last weekend I made the bad (for me) discovery that the maximum building size without a permit was 120sqft, not 150sqft. 120sqft is really too small to be a good workshop. I've also been trying to simplify, and I needed to consider that building a new structure wasn't really simplifying. This week I've been drawing my current basement in Visio to see if I can come up with a better layout.
I started by drawing only the bike part of the basement, but I realized that I needed to consider the whole basement to really make sense of what I have. Here is what I have now:
My real problem with the current basement isn't the lack of square feet (it is around 450-500sqft), it is with the layout. I have it split into four major areas, two workshops (bicycles and woodworking), laundry, and storage. Both of the workshop areas are too small for the individual goals and they can't easily be combined due to the layout of the basement. You can see that the bike area is tiny, I can hardly turn around if I have a bike setup on a stand. The bike area needs to be close to the back door for ventilation.
Last night I rotated the storage room by 90 degrees and came up with a much more workable plan:
The key thing here was combining my workshops into a single space. That space is 15ft x 17ft, plenty big for any of my projects. There are two posts in the way, but I can't do too much about that. The storage room is slightly smaller but has about the same amount of shelf space. My stuff won't clutter up the laundry area. Bike storage was moved out of the workshop area, reducing clutter there.
I'm excited about this plan. It's not expensive (especially when compared to building a new structure) and should make the space much more useful. I'll probably put some of my brazing projects on hold this winter to build out the space this way.
I made a Visio stencil with hanging bicycles and bicycles sitting on the floor for those who want to figure out their workshop space.