Thinking about space and workshops

When we moved to our current house I thought the basement was huge and would be a great place to work. 4 years later and feels crowded and out of control. For the past 6 months I’ve been thinking about different solutions to that problem.

My initial thoughts were to build a second building in our backyard. My original design was a garage because this seemed like it would make the most sense for house resale and I liked the roof top deck:

Christine was understandably upset about me taking over one third of the yard. The project would also be very expensive, and I wasn’t sure that a garage was necessarily the best shape.

Version 2 of this plan was still an outbuilding, but one with a smaller footprint and higher ceilings. The tall ceilings would give me plenty of storage (hanging bicycles from the ceiling) and the footprint would be large enough for me needs. It wouldn’t be huge, but it would be okay. That plan looked like this (in cut-away fashion):

Last weekend I made the bad (for me) discovery that the maximum building size without a permit was 120sqft, not 150sqft. 120sqft is really too small to be a good workshop. I’ve also been trying to simplify, and I needed to consider that building a new structure wasn’t really simplifying. This week I’ve been drawing my current basement in Visio to see if I can come up with a better layout.

I started by drawing only the bike part of the basement, but I realized that I needed to consider the whole basement to really make sense of what I have. Here is what I have now:

My real problem with the current basement isn’t the lack of square feet (it is around 450-500sqft), it is with the layout. I have it split into four major areas, two workshops (bicycles and woodworking), laundry, and storage. Both of the workshop areas are too small for the individual goals and they can’t easily be combined due to the layout of the basement. You can see that the bike area is tiny, I can hardly turn around if I have a bike setup on a stand. The bike area needs to be close to the back door for ventilation.

Last night I rotated the storage room by 90 degrees and came up with a much more workable plan:

The key thing here was combining my workshops into a single space. That space is 15ft x 17ft,plenty big for any of my projects. There are two posts in the way,but I can’t do too much about that. The storage room is slightly smaller but has about the same amount of shelf space. My stuff won’t clutter up the laundry area. Bike storage was moved out of the workshop area, reducing clutter there.

I’m excited about this plan. It’s not expensive (especially when compared to building a new structure) and should make the space much more useful. I’ll probably put some of my brazing projects on hold this winter to build out the space this way.

I made a Visiostencil with hanging bicycles and bicycles sitting on the floor for those who want to figure out their workshop space.

10 Comments

  1. Jim G says:

    The house I used to live in (rented the first floor unit) had the basement converted into a 2+ car garage, and in the process several wooden posts were removed and replaced with 2 larger steel posts and a 35ft engineered I-beam. It required some major house jacking (e.g., http://www.flickr.com/photos/salim/1473606/), but it’’s possible.

  2. Mike Jenkins says:

    It looks like you”ve saved yourself a bundle. Particularly since you”re not going to demolish and reconstruct a retaining wall.

    Have you considered the Park PRS-4W wall mounted work stand lag bolted to one of your columns? I love the portability of the tripod stands, but they do seem to take more space in a dedicated shop.

  3. AlexWetmore says:

    Jim — I”ve watched enough episodes of “This Old House” to know about replacing the main beam with something stronger, but it still seems like a huge project. For now I”ll live with the columns. Thanks for the photos though, those were fun.

    Mike — A column mounted workstand is a good idea. Ultimate makes one too. The other problem with the columns is that they tend to attract stuff. This is an old photo (the chimney is now gone):
    http://phred.org/~alex/pictures/house/basement-01-06/reduced/DSCF0268.jpg

    Ladders, snowboards, old bicycles, things just lean up against them.

    I”d still like to rebuild the retaining wall because the current stone one is very deep and wastes a lot of yard space. However it’’s probably not worth the cost (and permitting since the wall is >3 feet tall) to do so.

  4. jimmy livengood says:

    Yeah, those columns are a pain, I have a similiar problem in my basement. I like the idea of a column-mounted workstand, especially since there would still be good access to the far side of the bike.

    I”d be tempted to run the storage down the center along the columns, and have the full left side as workshop/bike storage.

    Of course, you could always dig out the crawlspace and expand the basement. We found a dried, shriveled cat when we did this at my grandfathers place, adventure awaits!

  5. AlexWetmore says:

    Christine wants to dig out the basement, but I”m worried about having to do foundation work. I think that is the plan if this reconfiguration doesn”t do it.

    Putting laundry and storage into a single room could work and give me half of the basement, I”ll have to draw it out.

    Our neighbors found a cat skeletan when they dug out their basement too.

    See you a Rollo!

  6. AlexWetmore says:

    Jimmy,

    Great idea about moving the storage to the other side. I combined it with the laundry and this gives me a huge workshop:
    http://alexandchristine.smugmug.com/gallery/3344558#222311082-XL-LB

  7. Richard says:

    Neat idea, I like the column mounted stand and large work space when the laundry and storage is combined.

    I have a very limited laundry/storage area that doubles as bike storage and limited work area as well. I should do some similar sketching and attempt to find a better solution.

  8. Rory "1 less car" says:

    ok, but you can”t forget one of the most important things in all our lives.

    beer.

    where’’s the brewing equipement?

  9. AlexWetmore says:

    Don”t worry Rory. The brewing equipment is still there, it is under the stairs and next to the sink as it’’s always been. I think it’’s the one thing that isn”t moving!

  10. Guy Bouchard says:

    Last saturday we were meeting a contractor for a big enlargment of our house. The guy (a friend of mine) said we were better take time to think about our space need and what we have right now. In a few hours, we already know the work will be a lot smaller. I am drawing plan right now (flourplanner.com). We will save money and time. I think it will be more efficient too. We have to take time to think!