Hi,
Great forum, I'm glad I found y'all. Thank you for providing yet another time sink for me to get lost in...
Assuming I don't run out of money, never a safe assumption, when we start on our little house construction next year I will be building a shop. My other hobby is restoring old cars and motorcycles, and the shop will mainly be focused around that. But there would be a possibility to sneak a woodshop into the plans.
My ambitions in the woodshop are relatively modest, and I imagine mainly cabinet and furniture projects in my future.
There are two possible places for it. One would be a smallish 12' x 24' space on the ground floor, with a double door at one of the 12' ends. The floor would be a slab. A separate room will already be housing a couple of air compressors (two "smaller" in series is cheaper than one "huge" one), and that room can easily be expanded somewhat to handle a dust collector. Dust collection would be overhead. A separate paint and finish room would be shared by the machinery shop and the woodshop.
The other possibility is kind of exciting but may be excruciatingly stupid. The shop will have a storage loft, and by raising the sidewalls a bit I could have a roughly 50' x 18' stand-up space for a workshop up there. Plenty of room...but of course, how do you get raw materials 12' up and then finished goods 12' down. Some of my past projects certainly wouldn't be made any worse by simply dropping them from that height, but I hope to improve over time.
On old barns you often see block and tackle for hoisting hay up into the loft, and I suppose a similar arrangement could be used, probably with much cursing and white knuckles. I imagine after one close call the huge worshop would be relegated to building things out of materials I could carry up in one hand on the stairs...
I can also imagine some sort of super-dumbwaiter, which would probably need to be 4' x 12' to be usable, with all sorts of engineering to insure it simply doesn't crash down when an armoire is loaded onto it or refuse to budge when the new table saw is ready to go up. Or ten sheets of plywood.
I guess I'm really wondering if anyone else has a shop in a loft, or whether I should simply be satisfied with the ground floor space and leave the loft to the decaying car parts. Thank you for any thoughts.
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Might as well buy the building again! We decided on purchasing a hefty used forklift, and mounting a lightweight cage on the forks to lift and lower the materials to the loft. The building had a concrete floor which would support the weight of this rig, so it seemed a reasonable solution. We never got that far, because the guy just wanted to much for the building, but as long a the inspectors don't look, and you set up and follow strict safety guidlines, I think this could work. And you can always detach the lift cage, and use the forklift for your other stuff as well.
Originally Posted by Tyler Howell
