Before and after

It’s sometimes hard to remember how things were, like when my current woodshop was just a big, ugly concrete box.

If you’re like me, you’re constantly tweaking your woodshop – new lighting or dust patterns, different working paths, additional shelving, racks and storage, things like that. But all of that comes after you establish your workspace as a shop, with everything you need in place to get going.

For example, I framed-out, drywalled, electrified, painted, equipped and otherwise outfitted my shop in its current state within the first year we lived here. I’ve really gotten used to it and tend to think it’s always been this way. But I happened to be going through some old photos this week and came across a folder with under-construction shots. Quite a difference.

The two photos above were taken at roughly the same angle and in the same direction. The upper photo was taken in 2017 right after moving in when the basement was totally empty, while the lower photo is from a year or two ago.

In the finished shop, those exposed basement stairs are now behind the oak cabinets, the furnace was walled in (open to the utility area on the other side of the basement), and a second closet built in front of it to create my dust collector containment with the two doors on the right. Every support column is enclosed in wall framing, with the center column hidden inside the boxed pillar where the dust duct runs into the ceiling joists.

There’s more to the shop than you can see above, but I did everything else pretty much the same way. I have a lot of workspace and it was a lot of work – I’d forgotten how much – but in retrospect I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.