This post is a permanent open invitation. Whether you’re working in a hall closet, a suburban one-car garage, a 200-square-foot outbuilding, or a basement with 6-foot-8 ceilings and two structural columns – we want to see your shop and hear about what you make in it. The small shop community is the most creative and resourceful community in woodworking, because constraint forces invention.
What we look for in a good submission: not perfection, not scale, not expense. We look for problem-solving. We look for the moment where you figured out how to make a small space do something it wasn’t supposed to be able to do. We look for the creative arrangement of machines that shouldn’t fit together but do. We look for the storage solution that gave you back six square feet you thought you’d lost. We look for the build that happened in a space where everybody said it couldn’t.
The gallery in this post currently holds 34 reader submissions across 14 states and 4 countries. The smallest is 40 square feet. The largest is a one-car garage at about 200 square feet. The most impressive is a 65-square-foot converted coal storage room in a Philadelphia rowhouse from which a professional chair maker has produced chairs that retail for $1,200. They’re beautiful. The shop is impossibly small. Both things are true simultaneously.
Submit three photos (overall space, best detail, and something you’ve made in it), your square footage, and a 100-word description of how the space works. We respond to every submission, feature every one we receive, and periodically do a “best of the month” highlight of the submissions that generated the most reader discussion. Submit below. The small shop community is waiting to be inspired by yours.