Shop Tour: The All-French-Cleat Shop
This shop is a deliberate experiment: what if every tool, every bin, every shelf, every jig was stored on a French cleat wall, with nothing fixed? The result is a 12-by-24-foot garage shop where every storage position is adjustable, every wall is covered in cleats from floor to ceiling, and the layout can be completely reconfigured in a weekend. After three years of refinement, this tour shows what an all-cleat shop looks like at maturity – and what the cleat philosophy does and doesn’t solve.
The Cleat Coverage
Four full walls are covered in 3/4-inch plywood cleats on 4-inch centers. The entry wall has cleats only above the light switches and outlets. Everything else – all four walls from floor to ceiling – is cleat-covered. Total panel material: approximately 200 square feet of 3/4-inch plywood, cut into 4-inch strips at 45 degrees and installed horizontally on 8-inch centers. The project took two weekends and cost about $400 in material.
What Hangs on the Cleats
Everything. Hand tools on individual holders. Power tools on built-up holders with electrical pass-throughs. Router bit storage in a custom holder with individual holes for each bit. Clamps on horizontal bars. Sandpaper in a vertical file holder. Hardware bins in short rows. Small shelves for finishing supplies. A fold-out bench on the most open wall section. The most-used tools cluster near the bench; less-used tools migrate to the upper corners of the walls where they’re visible but not in the way.
What Stays the Same After Three Years
The core tool positions haven’t moved in 18 months – hand planes on the left cleat panel at eye height, chisels below them, saws on the right panel, measuring tools at the end of the bench. The positions that were chosen intuitively turned out to be correct. The value of the cleat system is that you can discover the right position without committing – try a location for a month, move it if it’s wrong, without any extra holes or marks on the wall.
Key Lessons
- The all-cleat approach is genuinely worth it. The flexibility to relocate anything without drilling new holes has been used repeatedly – not just in the initial setup phase, but whenever a project requires reorganization for a specific workflow.
- Custom holders are worth building. Generic cleat hooks work, but a custom holder sized exactly for each tool is faster to use and looks better. The holder for each hand plane takes 20 minutes to build from scrap and lasts forever.
- The floor below the cleat walls is usable because no storage projects forward beyond the cleat surface. Tools on cleats occupy the wall space, not the floor space in front of it.
FAQ
Does the weight of tools on cleats damage the wall or the plywood?
No, if the cleats are properly mounted at stud locations. The load distributes across multiple studs through the cleat panel. Individual hooks that are loaded heavily should have their holders attached to at least two cleats for stability. The cleat system is remarkably strong – hundreds of pounds per panel section is easily achievable.
Can I do a partial cleat wall or does it need to be full coverage?
Partial works perfectly well. A 4-by-8-foot section behind the workbench produces enormous value with less than $50 in material. The all-cleat approach in this tour is an experiment in taking the idea to its logical extreme – you don’t need that to benefit from cleats.