Today marks one week that I have been in my new house. Up to now, I’ve been very busy getting my old house ready to sell and building a shed here, and I’m not even close to having anything organized. More than half of my personal belongings are still packed up in boxes, and these are stacked up all over the place. I have a lot less space to put things in this house, plus the basement is off limits until I can do some work down there – replace the windows and building a raised floor over the concrete slab, to begin with. I need to finish the basement, making it livable space, and that will be where I’ll start renovations. This may seem odd, to start at what most people consider the least important part of the house, but it makes sense to do it this way. Considering that the entire main level needs to be gutted, I’ll need living space while that is happening, and that will have to be the finished basement.

I’ll be covering most of the renovation work on this site, plus the usual workshop related projects, so things should be interesting for the next year, or so.

I took some pictures of my shop (now just a garage) after everything was out and the area cleaned. Funny seeing it this way – it looks huge. Hard to imagine that I could run out of space here:

It did seem cramped, at times, but for the short term my situation has definitely not gotten any better. Much worse, in fact, since now I have a shop that is less than half the size of my old one:

The new shop is a garage (pictures are taken standing outside, with the overhead door open) that is about 11′ x 23′, or less than half the size of my old shop. As you can see, there isn’t much space to move around with all of my tools in there. In fact, not everything would fit – absent is my workbench, which is actually in the kitchen of my house (with boxes piled on it…).
To clear it out enough to work in there, I’ve been building a shed behind the garage to put some of the tools, and all of the lumber and supplies.
The shed (details here) has 7′ x 15′ of floor space and will have built in shelves and a lumber rack. To make the new shop usable, I’ll have to put some of the less used tools out there as well: my big band saw and possibly the lathe, depending upon how well I can organize the new shop space. My metal working table will also have to go in there.
As I said above, this situation is a temporary one. My long term plan is to build a larger, dedicated workshop, and I’ll have more details on this soon.

In the meantime, I’ll make do with this shop, but there is one thing I need to address before winter sets in again:

Look familiar? If you’ve been a reader of this blog from the start, you will remember that my old house had a similar problem of a deteriorated roof. This time, it’s mainly this (south facing) side of the garage roof that is literally days from leaking. Before the end of the summer the roof shingles will have to be replaced. Luckily, it’s a relatively small roof and should only take a day or two. The picture was taken from the roof of the new shed, by the way, which is being shingled today.