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[DYWORKSHOP]

I found Homemade tools while searching Pinterest for table saw jigs. It looks like an interesting site to spend some time.

I'm in Hoover, AL, a suburb of Birmingham. I was introduced to tools by my Dad, who was a DIYer by necessity. I had three brothers and three sisters so my Dad made our bedroom furniture indestructible from pine shelving wood. I still remember going to the lumberyard with my Dad. One time he found a clear pine board at shelving price. What a find!

So, l have been doing wood work for most of my 63 years. Currently, most of my wood work is art and craft projects. Much of my latest work is posted to Pinter's.com/James Waligora and Facebook.com/James Waligora.DYWorkshop.

I do have a free standing workshop that is 20 X 24. My workshop is not very organized or neat. Since. I make use of recycled wood and small pieces of wood, I have a lot of scraps, usually piled on the floor. So, suggestions to overcome this habit would be read. (I won't say implemented or appreciated.)

And if you read this far, I have been looking for a Popular Mechanics or Popular Science plan or picture of yard art project of Santa in sleigh, reindeers and Rudolph. I believe it would have been in the 60's. I have searched old magazines and must have missed it. My Dad made it and evidently didn't take any pictures of it.

Look forward to more information. Be safe making sawdust.

[Jon]

Hi DYWORKSHOP - welcome to HomemadeTools.net

Feel free to add links to your Pinterest board and Facebook page in to your forum signature, so that people can visit them easily.

For storing stock like wood scraps, my best recommendation is vertical cubbies in a corner. This makes use of corner real estate in your shop. One cubby can store 4x8 sheets, one long stock, and then you can subdivide another cubby into four 1-foot sections for smaller stock. If you ever see how stores like Home Depot vertically store stuff like 1x2s, that type of storage is what I mean.

This is one place where Pinterest ideas can get a bit too "Pinterest-y" - lots of rolling, spinning, hinging, stacking storage ideas that look great in web photos. I wrote more about wacky garage organization ideas here: Garage organization madness

My strategy is: determine what goes in the corners, determine what can be stored overhead, determine what can be stored hanging on the walls. Then I see if anything can be stored behind, on the sides of, or in a crawlspace underneath the shop. Then I throw stuff away as much as I can bear it. That's my path to the holy grail of garage organization: open floorspace. I also like all shelves, pegboards, and workbenches to have at least 25% free space.

Not sure about the old art project though; you might have to poke around in Google to find it.

[DYWORKSHOP]

Thanks for the information. Yes, my problem is the throwing out part.

[mklotz]

Thanks for the information. Yes, my problem is the throwing out part.

Get in the habit of marking the month/year on "susceptible to discard" items when you acquire them. This is fairly obvious with anything that has a shelf-life, e.g., glue, paint, but is also useful for making discard decisions on other stuff.

Now decide on a "discard interval". Mine is two years. If I pick up something that has a date that indicates it hasn't been used in two years, it goes in the trash. If you only use part of an item, e.g., cut a piece from a sheet of flashing, scribe the current date under the old one and throw it back in storage. The discard interval may be variable and depend on the volume of shop space occupied by the object.

What "susceptible to discard" means is a personal thing that everyone must decide for himself. Some items are easy. Antique tools inherited from ancestors never are even if unused for decades. Exotic materials that are hard to find usually aren't nor are items that have become terribly expensive to replace.

What's important is to decide a priori on a retention regimen that you can live with and then apply it unfailingly.

[Jon]

What's important is to decide a priori on a retention regimen that you can live with and then apply it unfailingly.

This retention regimen (essentially a separation of deciding and doing) is a hallmark of many organizational strategies. You see it in productivity regimens with yearly "dumpster days".

There's also a popular closet organizing trick by which you turn all of your hangars in one direction. As you wear an item, you turn the hangar back in the other direction. After one year, you can easily see all of the clothes that have not been worn for an entire year - these are your candidates for donation.

There are various related concepts in psychology and behavioral economics that address this behavior:

Mere ownership effect and Endowment effect - owning something compels you to assign a higher value to it.

Loss aversion - essentially, not losing $100 is considered much better than finding $100.

Sunk cost - you've already paid the cost of saving, cataloging, and storing an item. When you throw something away, you "lose" that investment.

And, the newer IKEA effect - we place a higher value on something if we created, built, or even just assembled it by ourselves.

[mklotz]

Then there are the more draconian paring-down techniques...

Move a distance of 500 miles or more every two years. Extra points if you don't use a moving company.

Move into a houseboat or a one room cabin.

Pretend that you've been ordered to leave your home because of impending wildfires (seeing a lot of that in SoCal right now). Get a Hertz panel truck and load into it everything you would take in that case.

Lastly, and recommended only for the terminally desperate, have your wife reorganize your shop. (The only technique more desperate than this is having your ex-wife reorganize your shop.)