Custom built specific cabinets or standard designs/layouts?

[Joshua Dinerstein]

I have been looking recently at how to maximize the usefulness of my shop. Having some small amount of storage is proving to just simply be insufficient. I posted a question about finding guidelines and received some great responses.

One pointed me to a shopnotes special "The Complete Small Shop" that had a great deal of good information.

I am finding even more now that I have some idea of what to look for. In some cases the results seem to be targeted at "lots and lots of drawer with some doors". I can see the value in this and I have even been heading in this direction for some time.

The second alternative appears to be totally custom storage. And by that I don't mean building your own cabinets over buying some from HD/Lowes/Ikea etc... But rather they are building something of a cross between shelves and cabinets with a ton of dados that are what I would call strange sizes. Then shelves and drawers are put in anywhere along in these massive numbers of dados so that you can create tall "sections" where wanted and shallow ones where not wanted. This variability in sizes is then coupled with the creation of some rather specified base pieces. I have seen some notched so that the guard and blade of a circular saw slip into it and the base on the saw lays flat and solid.

I can see the benefits of both but I wonder what approach has really proven itself to those that have gone before me. I can see the niceness of configurable storage but it comes at the cost of having to build out everything yourself. The other alternative comes with the benefit of very standard sizes in a very quick construction, so I can get my shop put together and organized before true winter arrives, nice finishes etc... but at the cost of having to make rather stock arrangements meet my needs.

So I just wanted to ping those who have created, and or re-created their shops, before me which way they went and whether or not they liked the end results? What they might change if they were gearing up to do it again?

Thanks Guys! I am really looking forward to your responses.

Joshua

[Rich Neighbarger]

Sorry, I build my own to fit my needs. I'm a stickler for everything matching and I don't want to keep going back to a builder everytime I need a new cabinet. I'm one of those who can't leave well enough alone, so my shop is never complete, just in various stages of complete. As for the box store cabinets: I haven't been impressed with the quality. I have a shop and enjoy building things, so I don't mind building my own cabinets when I'm not under time pressure to do so. Because I built them, they fit and function exactly how I need them to, and I can say "I built that" when someone comments about them.