The Clean-enough-to-eat-from Shop
Mike Hayes' experience as a restaurant chef informed his shop design when he built it several years ago: "In the kitchen, I had to know every day that all my tools were in the right place. Everything we needed was hanging on racks—there wasn't time to look for things in a drawer." In his woodworking shop, he applied the concept by storing most tools on open shelves, unimpeded by doors.
For the interior of his shop, Mike chose affordable 3⁄4 " oriented-strand board (OSB). "OSB just doesn't show dirt," he says, although he confesses to recoating the floor with polyurethane every few years due to daily wear.
And, just as a chef tweaks a recipe many times to perfect it, Mike "built" a scaled version of his 16×24' shop from cardboard and rearranged the tools within it several times before actually breaking ground. "I originally planned a 16×20' shop," he says, "but it wasn't working out right, so I added on to my model."
The only thing he would do differently is make it taller. "I was used to the low ceiling in my old basement shop. Without a roof, the luxury of a 10' ceiling didn't show up on my scale model," he chuckles.
