the Shed of Happiness

Mike Herring

Member
Messages
13
Location
Fort Worth, TX
Howdy,

I've had my own workshop for a few months now, but I'm still in the "getting everything sorted out" stage. Before this I was in half of a two car garage that had a car parked in the other half.

There is an old rusty Arrow shed in the backyard that we use for lawn mowers and bikes that we've nicknamed the Shed of Despair, so to distinguish my workshop shed from it, it's been christened the Shed of Happiness.

Thought y'all might like to take a look at it. :)

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The shed is roughly 12x24. Very roughly, it's interior is closer to 10.5 x 22.5. It's a Morgan building. It's barn shaped, roughly 12 foot high in the center. The walls are roughly 7 foot tall. I added extra studs (the shed was built with 30 inch centers!) and built a loft, left about four feet at each end to get up there and get stuff down. Right now the loft is four sheets of 4x8 OSB, so that's an extra...128 square feet of storage. The purple lines on the drawing below are where the loft is. I left the middle open for now, although I find I never use it for access, so soon it'll be covered up with OSB, too.

Here is my latest layout plan for the Shed of Happiness:



As best I could I made everything to scale. Tools are blue. Storage is (mostly) red. The yellowish things are benches. Right now the benches are solid core wooden fire doors on legs, with 2x6s for stiffening. I hope to build at least one good woodworking bench in the nearish future. It'll have a bit of old bowling alley for the top.

Took some pictures of the shed while I was building the loft, they're here.

After the wiring is done then I'll put up pegboard or plywood on the rest of the walls. Right now just from the floor to four feet is has OSB on it. All the outlets will be at four feet, I hate having to bend over and dig around behind stuff to get to outlets.

I don't have a dust system, yet, other than "wear a mask, and when it gets bad open the doors and run the leaf blower." :)

Wood storage will be up in the loft, or on a rack over the lathe and/or RAS if I end up needing more storage. Wood drying will be done in the mezzanne of the attic of my parents house. It gets pretty warm up there, and there's plenty room. Haven't taken any pictures up there since we finished the attic, sorry.

I'm a little light on tools right now. A lot of my tools, both hand tools and power tools, were hand me downs. But I'm slowly building up. Got some neat old Millers Falls hand drills the other day at a garage sale. Haven't run across any good old planes though. Hoping to find a nice older jointer and or thickness planer soon.

My table saw is in the garage right now. Buried under a pile of stuff temporarily, while we work on the fixing up our house. It's an older craftsman cabinet saw. It's going to be cleaned up a bit and repainted, and get some additional extensions and a mobile base before going out to the shed.

I bought a Boice Crane cabinet saw at an auction for $20 a few weeks ago. Surprisingly it works fine. Does need a fence and a miter gauge and a blade guard, and a blade, but aside from that it was all there and working. I fixed it up this last weekend, cleaned it up a bit, got the table nice and clean, re-wired the motor, and now my brother in law is taking care of it for me. It's replacing his Harbor Freight TS with a burned out motor.

The RAS is in use right now at my dad's, but once we finish rebuilding their house we'll work on rebuilding his workshop, and then he'll start using a big DeWalt RAS and I'll take care of his Craftsman RAS. The metal shaper and lathe are still in storage, but once the shed floor is braced some more and made nice and sturdy they'll be moved out there. I don't know how much the lathe weighs, but it's around 800 pounds. Aside from the metal shaper and the drill press, all the large power tools will have mobile bases. I went ahead and put them on the layout even though I don't have them yet, so I could see where they'd fit.

I know you're not supposed to mix metal and wood working, but given the size I don't think I'll be able to have separate areas.

Any thoughts? Good, bad or ugly.

Thanks!

-Mike
 
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Hey Mike -- Lookin' Good

I'm in a shed also, its 20' x 28' -- I had it custom built on site. It's wood frame with the metal roof. I insulated it drywalled it. It works just fine, it's my little piece of paradise in this crazy world. Sure beats sharing the garage!!
 
Hi Mike! Welcome to the Family. Good to see another wood cousin from Fort Worth!
Getting out of the garage is a wonderful thing. Congrats on the shop. It takes a while to get things right. (Or so I've heard...I'm still rehabbing mine.:D) Jim.

PS: where did you find the bowling alley wood? I'd love to be able to find about 11 feet of it for my multistation wall bench top.
 
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Thanks guys!

The bowling alley wood came out of one of the air force bases down in San Antonio a few years ago. They were rebuilding it or something and tossed the wood out!
 
Mike,
One thing I noticed that you might want to reconsider; the height of your outlets. not quite 'everyone', but most magazines etc... suggest outlets at 50inches above the floor. That way if you ever lean a piece of sheet goods against the wall you'll still have access to the outlets. YMMV of course.

I'm just about one week from beginning construction, just have to get my plans reapproved by the township. It should go through just fine.

Welcome aboard, (forgot to say that in my last post).
 
ok i dont see it???

a couple of you guys have mentioned that jeff would drool over the jointer well from what i read he doesnt have a jointer yet???? but did score big time on that boice crane table saw... and looks like a great shop you got going there,, happiness is in a new shop fer sure..
 
a couple of you guys have mentioned that jeff would drool over the jointer well from what i read he doesnt have a jointer yet???? but did score big time on that boice crane table saw... and looks like a great shop you got going there,, happiness is in a new shop fer sure..


Geez Larry, I did not want to say nothing, you know how sensitve Tod is about this kind of stuff.................. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

I too did not see it, but I don't have the nose for old arn and machines like Tod does, so I thought I must have missed it.....
 
"there's an aircraft carrier ... lurking in there"

Yep. And it's got bolt holes in the base, just like Jeff's. I'm starting to think they bolted those things to the railroad cars during shipping... ;)

In any case, the whole setup is cool. I'm in a garage for the duration, but it's always good to hear someone has escaped that fate... ;)

The shed of happiness... what a great name! ;)

Thanks,

Bill
 
The Shed of Happiness, :thumb: Couldn't have picked a better name.
Putting the new shop together will rank high on the list of your most fondly remembered projects.

I love how the end of the building opens up. I think I would build me a framework about three or four feet that extends out from the top of those doors and hang a chain hoist on it. Put a little pad under that and work in the sunshine every chance I got. :thumb:

DT
 
The 16 inch jointer they're refering to is my dad's. He got it for $200 at the same auction I got the Boice Crane table saw. I'm trying to arrange to "take care" or "store" dad's 8 inch Powermatic jointer, since it's "old" and "so small", but he kinda thinks it'll be usefull to keep around. Dang it :)



It's a big one. Weighs, well, a lot. We figure it's about 1800 pounds. Until we get a mobile base for it made it's living in the driveway, under a couple of plastic tarps and slathered in oil. The walkbehind forklift we have will not go up the ramp into the garage with the jointer on it, so it's kinda stuck there until the mobile base is made.

Ya know, it does kinda look like an aircraft carrier...maybe we should paint it battleship gray? And I bet my 1:144 scale WWII planes would be right on, scale wise. Hmmmm....four or five more jointers and we could recreate the battle of Midway! :)
 
I was kind of laughing at this thread. First because of the name of the Shed. The Shed of Happiness is a pretty cool name. I call my shop the VEGAS SHOP. I named it that because I told my wife, no woman were allowed in there, and that is a good name for it because "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas," or so the slogan goes...hence the Vegas Shop.

As for my jointer, I call it the USS Ronald Reagan. I am a die-hard Republican for starters, and I call it that because the USS Ronald Reagan was the last aircraft carrier built.

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