The Curious…..Workshop.

Taking the theme of my Curious Cabinet and turning it into an entire Workshop.

Several years ago and many blog posts in the past I wrote about the wall display cabinet I built for the ‘office’ (my home workspace) wall. I never gave it much attention after the time that I finished the basic carcass, painted it in a rich Chinese red and started to populate it with oddities based largely on my life with boats and the sea. In a way it’s my take on the historical idea of a Cabinet of Curiosities with bits n pieces that I acquired – the two most recent objects being a ceramic plate with a compass rose design and more recently a small piece of limestone from our Jurassic coast with a fossilized fish embedded in it.

Recently, I had good cause to take some time off from my heavy excavation of the old workshop floor so I used some of that time to reorganize our bookshelves and in so doing I came across several books that I had forgotten about. One of these was based on the life, work and curious mind of film producer Guillermo Del Toro and specifically the entire house that he uses for his writing, his model making and his very eclectic collections of (mainly) film based props. If you hadn’t already worked it out then that’s the subject of the title photograph (Bleak House) for this post.

A very early iteration of the workshop and the CC before it acquired the frame off of a painting as it’s own fronts piece. Also, that’s the workshop in it’s cold and damp stage and when it had two very odd workbenches – this (below) is what it looks like today, as I write – and yes that’s yours truly with his feet in the former rock pit.

Today, i’m just about to finish digging out the 24 M.Sq of workshop floor and learning what I have to do next so maybe it’s a bit early to start to define how the workshop looks after iv’e done the actual construction (with lots of help) and my main winter project which is to fit it out. All along iv’e had this slightly weird idea borrowed from a local diner that used to have a model train layout in LGB scale trundling around over the customers heads.

I got as far as realizing that I don’t have the space at that height for an LGB scale layout and I would. kinda/sorta like to have it as a layout that is trundling through mixed scenes from my own life. One idea, just as an example, is that one part of the scenery would have to industrial and one of the building fronts in 2 dimensions, would always have to be the Led Zeppelin album cover Physical Graffiti. For the actual model/layout I have in mind something like the elevated railway that snakes through New York but in a smaller gauge than the LGB layout in that diner.

This is, i’m sure. getting way ahead of myself as I don’t have a floor yet and soon won’t have an actual roof until we put the new one on. Even after the building work is done iv’e iv’e got to insulate, put lighting and power back in and build both benches and a new storage area. Now though, the project is near enough to be actually happening so i’m doing a bit of sketching and designing how both the actual workshop and the external work space – the one under the boatbuilding shelter outside – will be laid out and used.

I was at the point of working out the best way of building a dust collection system that actually works when I realized that I might not need to be working with large sheets of plywood inside the workshop and instead do all that kind of work outside on my rebuilt boatbuilding bench ; the interior workshop space could then start off it’s life as a clean and mostly dust free one.

A thought that was several steps further on is that I might not need the outside space to build another boat because i’m unlikely to ever build another one although I do have several maker projects in mind for which I would need boatbuilding tools. With a new workshop to design and build one of the obvious things is to work out tool placement and tool storage ; right now i’m thinking of keeping my table saw and other dust producing power tools outside and rebuilding one of the interior walls for a nice looking hand tool display which would also keep everything in good condition. Today, iv’e been considering the possibility of using the inside face of my new workshop doors as storage for my most frequently used hand tools as they would then be in a good place for inside and outside access – I also quite like vertically orientated dedicated tool racks.

So…..from whimsy to practicality and back again in one post – there is though a positive end to my rambles today.

My last few posts have largely been negative, for instance that iv’e chosen to write at length about the end of my life as an outdoorsman and, more recently, that iv’e completely retired from sailing. You might think, as I did, that those things would also draw a line under the blog as 90% of my output has been about the world of boats and sailing. I find though that, shock horror and outrage, that there might be a life outside boats and sailing and one of the first things that my ‘whatever next’ is like then it seems to need a new base aka a new workshop.

Best wishes y’awl