Thought I”d give you an idea of the shop, from 1993 to now. Its been an interesting ride, as I slowly built up my woodworking skills and tools, and built the shop up.

My wife and I moved into our house in 1993, a bit of a fixer-upper, with lots to do, and not enough money to do it. Behind the house was a 1-1/2 car garage (16×24), with a small attic above.

• It had two 4-ft long fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling.
  • It had four outlets tied to a 30amp panel with the old fuses in it.
  • It was uninsulated, and the floor showed signs of water. The winters in NJ can get cold, and the summers hot, so this was going to be interesting.
  • It had a makeshift bench in one corner. What was interesting was that the bench had a small 16” wide elevated platform in front of it to stand on. This should have given me pause, but I was happy with having some place to start

I spent the next 5 years mostly doing work around the house and the occasional bit of woodworking. Nothing major, a bookshelf, a few small projects. For tools I had your general startup home tools (circular saw, drills, router, benchtop tablesaw, etc.) It was difficult to do quality work with the power tools I had, and for instruction, all I really had was episodes of Norm’s “New Yankee Warehouse”. Of course the problem with that was that I didn’t have the powerful tools that he had – so it was difficult to conceive of doing that kind of work.

One of the challenges I had was that the shop flooded whenever we had any sort of rain. After about a year of trying to figure it out, I determined that the driveway originally stopped 40 ft in front of where the garage was built, at the top of the slope of the yard. When they built the garage, they ran the driveway to it, but the slope was slightly down – so I had a 40ft x 12ft ramp, right into the garage door. Kind of like a slip & slide!

I fixed it somewhat by pouring another 3 inches to the garage slab, and doing some work to slope the water away from the entry. It wasn’t until 2007 when we had the driveway completely redone, that I changed the slope entirely and fixed the problem long term.

Luckily, in the late 90s, I became friends with another amateur woodworker, John. The advantage with John was that we could buy & share tools – and since he didn’t have a garage or potential workshop, a lot of times they ended up residing in my garage. That was how I ended up with John’s contractor tablesaw in the shop – which greatly improved my ability to execute woodworking. My father gave me a floor model drill press (he bought a new one) and between John and I, we began assembling other power tools (jointer, planer, dust collector, etc.). My projects expanded somewhat, though my wife’s love of books meant I was building a lot of shelves.

So by 2000, I had a contractor’s tablesaw, jointer, planer, miter saw, drill press, benchtop router table, dust collector (Jet 1HP) and a collection of tools. I was getting regular editions of Wood Magazine, and had built a lot of items from there (bench, lumber cart, etc.) and from Norm’s videos (clamp cart, miter saw stand, etc.). At the time, I would have considered myself a disciple of Norm Abram, and a true power tool user.