We’ve photographed a lot of shops. Nice shops, creative shops, impressively equipped shops. But the two-car garage workshop belonging to Anne in suburban Minneapolis is the first shop we’ve visited where we couldn’t find a single thing out of place – not a stray pencil, not an orphaned clamp, not a piece of scrap on a horizontal surface where it didn’t belong. Everything has a home. Everything is in its home. After eight years of building and refining the system, it looks effortless. It is not effortless. It is the product of a philosophy applied consistently for a very long time.
The shop covers 440 square feet in a two-car garage. Anne works primarily in hand-tool furniture making with occasional power tool assists. Her machines: a SawStop 10-inch cabinet saw on a rolling base, a 14-inch bandsaw, a 6-inch jointer, and a 15-inch planer – all parked against the north wall when not in use, all on mobile bases. The center of the shop is entirely clear. The south wall is her primary work wall: a full-width French cleat system from the floor to 7 feet, holding every hand tool she owns in a dedicated holder, organized by function from left to right.
The workbench runs the length of the east wall – a full 10 feet, 3-inch maple top, twin screw face vise on the left, wagon vise on the right, dog holes every 3 inches. The bench is the shop’s heart. “I designed everything else around where I needed to be relative to the bench,” Anne says. The machine positions, the cleat wall layout, the lumber storage – all were determined after the bench was placed. The bench is the fixed point; everything else orbits it.
Her floor is polished concrete with non-slip sealant. Her lighting is a grid of 12 LED shop lights on three independent switches – she can light the machine area, the workbench area, or the finishing corner independently. Her dust collection is a 3-horsepower cyclone collector mounted outside the garage with a 4-inch trunk line in through the wall. The shop is genuinely beautiful to work in. Submit your shop for a feature – our photographer visits any shop within 200 miles of Minneapolis, and our readers contribute galleries from everywhere else.