Four hundred square feet. A table saw, an 8-inch jointer, a 13-inch planer, a 14-inch bandsaw, a drill press, a lathe, a workbench, a sharpening station, a finishing area, a lumber storage rack, and a clamp wall. All of it fits. Not comfortably, not spaciously, but with no compromises on which machines are present – all of them are present, all of them are accessible, and all of them can be used without moving another machine first. This is the claim Dan makes about his one-car garage shop in Colorado, and after walking through it twice with a tape measure, we believe him.
The configuration requires accepting some unconventional layout decisions. The table saw is not in the center of the shop – it’s along the long wall, with an 8-foot clear outfeed path that also serves as the shop’s primary traffic lane. The jointer and planer share a corner, oriented so the jointer’s outfeed feeds directly to the planer’s infeed – material flows from one machine to the other with a single step sideways. The bandsaw is on a mobile base in the back corner, rolled out when needed.
The lathe is the most creative placement: it sits on a fold-down shelf that extends from the wall at the appropriate height when the shelf is deployed, and folds flat against the wall when not in use. The lathe base attaches to the fold-down shelf and lifts off in 90 seconds for storage in a floor cabinet beneath the shelf. Dan turns for about two hours a week and considers the fold-down arrangement an acceptable cost for the floor space it returns the other five and a half days.
“Every square foot of this shop is doing a specific job,” Dan says. “There is no space being wasted, but there’s also no space being doubled-used in a way that creates conflict. I mapped it with cardboard cutouts for three weeks before I moved anything.” The cardboard cutout method comes up in our reader conversations more than any other shop layout tool. It works. What’s your machine count vs. square footage, and how did you solve the layout?