With fall here and my woodshop a lot cooler, I’m eagerly anticipating some shop upgrades I’ve been postponing over the hot summer.

Top of the list among those tasks is my disorganized lumber shelves, something I alluded to a couple weeks ago. Getting lumber racks disorganized is easy; you just do it a little bit at a time. Getting them back in an efficient order is hard, and not something you want to do in the heat of summer.

I also want to tweak my dust collection ductwork to eliminate several bends and shorten the overall run. Again, with a lot of crawling, lifting and carrying that’s not a chore for a hot, humid shop.

I built a very large hardware center a couple years ago with two of those plastic things-with-lots-of-drawers and dozens of individual bins all housed in a wall-mounted wooden cabinet. Although it improved hardware and fastener organization a hundredfold when I made it, it’s been in dire need of sorting and reorganizing. That would have been a fine task for a hot day – minimal movement involved – but I had a bunch of procrastination to take care of first and never got to it.

Every fall I take care of bunches of shop upgrades and improvements like these, from minor to major. Invariably it’s stuff I’ve been putting off, but once fall rolls around it’s the perfect time to get to it all. And when I do, I’m always glad I did. The shop looks better, it’s more efficient, everything’s easier to find, and I’m a happier guy.

The big question when doing shop improvements like these is, where do I start?

A bigger question, perhaps, is when do I stop?

A.J.