I was working in my shop last weekend (on the aforementioned closet shelves) and started looking around and seeing wasted space and other inefficiencies. When Sandie bought the house, the shop was outfitted with what were obviously cabinets that had at some point been in a kitchen. There was a long rank of cabinets along the back wall with a kitchen sink in the middle of it. Two ranks of overhead cabinets were mounted on the side walls. Another floor rank ran along one of the walls. And there were a few of basically stand-alone cabinets scattered here and there. They weren’t in the best places, but I guess they were fairly functional, the sink notwithstanding.
Sandie had a long workbench that her father had made, so we put that in the shop as well.
Then Sandie decided to remodel her kitchen….and I added most of THOSE kitchen cabinets to the shop. Took the kitchen island, added some casters, made it a mobile workbench. Moved the other stuff around against the walls. Made a little “L” on one wall. There was, to put it mildly, a lot of counter/bench space – and not a lot of room for anything else.
Over the past couple of years, as I’ve tinkered around with the shop layout, I’ve come to the conclusion that probably 50% of the cabinets are completely unused. And this weekend, I noticed that the long rank of overheads that had been there from the start (in which I’ve been storing lots and lots of paint) are most decidedly bowing in the middle. Add to that the fact that the paint is not very organized, making it difficult to find what’s needed, and I decided that it was time to make some changes.
I haven’t really figured out what those changes will be, but I’m sure that at least THAT set of overheads is coming down and probably being relegated to a pile of scrap wood or a dumpster. First, though, I need a place for the paint. So I build a couple of simple shelf sets out of plywood, which will hang on cleats on the wall. That was my Sunday project. Came out pretty good, and each unit holds 16 gallons of paint. Now all I have to do is figure out where I’m going to hang them. Once I’ve done that, I can commence with taking down that set of cabinets. I have NO idea how I’m going to do that without hurting myself, but it needs to be done, and it will start the process of making a great workshop.
In other news, we interviewed 5 folks for the director of the GBB job last week. One more to go (next week, when I’m in Canada). No clear leader at this point, and it’s going to be tough to whittle the 6 down to three finalists, who will each take a concert series this year to help us (and the band) decide who gets the gig. Some have very strong administrative skills, others have strong brass band experience. I’m kind of hoping we can get one of the latter as the primary director, and one of the former as an associate.