Workshop....Unplugged (for a while)

So, as my family and I were moving out of our house in North Carolina, nestled snugly between the swamps of hell and the fields of desperation, I received a job offer in Minnesota.  I took the job and moved up to St. Paul while my wife and daughters stayed in Atlanta with inlaws.  I found a little room to rent and figured it wold only be a month or two until my family moved up.  Long story short, it was almost 9 months.  So I set up shop in my little room.  I used the workbench I made for Emry, my 10 year old, and by force I finally went cold turkey into an unplugged work shop.  Here is what it looked like:

Not a whole lot of room, but with hand tools only, I didn't need much.  This forced me to get a lot better at the basics of woodworking.  Ripping a 12' board by hand forces you to get pretty good at sawing to a line (and helps you learn new and interesting cuss words).  Here are a few of the projects I made using all hand tools:

My roommates were pretty tolerant of my strange noises and piles of lumber, but didn't appreciate it when I was chopping mortices before bed.  After nine months of living apart, my wife and I bought our first house.  It's our dream house, really.  My wife loves the house, but for me, the insulated and walled in third garage stall workshop is a dream.  I moved all my tools in on the cement floor until we could figure out our budget for a better floor.

As you can see, I got the lumber rack hung, my daughter's workbench set up (complete with her personal tools above it, and her list of projects to build on yellow sticky notes-so cute).  But the cement floor was a drag, and I have to admit, I would cringe every time I saw a handplane sitting on the edge of a bench. We were able to scrape up a little extra money in the budget and decided to put a floor in.  I went with Dricore flooring.  It is a floating subfloor designed to go directly over concrete.  It allows the cement to breathe, and helps control moisture, plus it was pretty easy to install and only costs about $1.30/sqft.  Here is the installation:  

I liked that it only added about 7/8" to the concrete, so all the doors in the shop still work correctly.  If the floor were any thicker, I would have had to cut doors.  Well, 55 tiles later, my 220 sqft shop was done.  Behold, my happy place!

So, as you can see, my shop is no longer unplugged.  I still prefer hand tools, and all my joinery is by hand, but rough cutting stock by hand just sucks, so I'll cheat on that part.  The attentive reader may note that the table saw is NOT plugged in.  The shop does not have a 220v outlet, so it remains in hibernation, and I sleep well at night (until my friend helps me run the 220V to the shop, then I'll once again sleep in fear of the man-eating table saw).

So my journey has gone from all power tools, to all hand tools, to a hybrid but mostly hand tool woodshop.  I've learned a lot on the journey, and I'm happy with where I am.  So is Emry:

Now, it's time to start some Christmas projects...