Atelier observations and progress

One lolly right now? Or two lollies later? My natural disposition is give me the lolly now, but I’ve worked on choosing the latter my entire adult life, and I suspect I’ll continue to until I don my wooden pyjamas.

Setting up the atelier, as exciting as it is, is testing my patience muscle. It is a slow, physical, hot process. It's also mostly me, and while I've borrowed brawn when I can from Lincoln, Lex, and Lex's lovely friend, Hunter (Hi!), I can't keep up with the unrealistic to-do lists I conjure on the reg.

But I'm getting there. I've just the materials, tools and equipment stashed at home to move over, the final coat of paint in the studio (along with fixing some painting mishaps, don't ask), and then the arranging can begin in earnest.

I've been putting a lot of thought into storage: it needs to serve me now through the next twelve months, it needs to be ample, and it must also be simple to disassemble/transport/reassemble. For open storage, pegboard worked well in my tiny garage, but now I need something more robust.

I've settled upon French cleats. They can be mounted onto panels, or directly onto the wall. Reconfiguration is a cinch, and they can hold serious weight. I also like being able to see everything out and at the ready.

If you’re not familiar with French cleats, here is a good little video explainer:

I’ll need to build the holders for each tool, but most will be super simple, and the holder will stay with its tool no matter where I am. I feel like this will be a great project to season and calibrate my tools after four months sans use; I'm busting to get into it. I have a chaotic Pinterest board for this project if you’d like a peek.

Speaking of projects, I'm also planning the next mach of my workbench.

It's designed by Patricio Ortega from Maderística in Chile, who is also the architect of the workbench I built almost two years ago.

I only have access to the model (which he shares as part of his course Professional Woodworking for Beginners), so I need to reverse engineer the design and add my own mods, but it means I get to continue improving the project planning skills I developed during my TAFE studies.

I've been using SketchUp for Web, my own cutting list template (using Google Sheets), and the free version of CutList Optimizer for planning and to maximise the yield of my materials.

Thank you for reading my latest, friend. It’s an honour to have you give me your time.

Until next week!

Amanda