Tiny Shop almost done!!

Like most of us, I've never built a living or working space from the bottom up, but 6-7 months later (in line with the estimate), Tiny Shop is nearing delivery! All the decisions have been a pain. Do I have them paint it? Is that a good price? I'm certainly not going to paint it. Turns out all I want to do is insulation and flooring.

Figuring out the physical thing, a tiny house on a hefty trailer, highlights how absurd Micro Shop is. The built-in full-length workbench—taking up 40% of the interior width, and a permanent installation—might be made workable if the space had any height, which it doesn't. Not only can I not turn around without knocking stuff onto the floor, but I have instruments and machine tools and measuring stuff, and I can't go up on the storage, because the roof is right there, a few inches above my head.

Countless problems solved by an open space of 8 feet instead of 3 feet.

I also happened across a local liquidation auction that had a bigger lathe. It's more important that I upgrade the mill first, so I was going to do that, but then this is the lathe I would eventually want to upgrade to anyway, but at a 25-40% discount, with all the trimmings. It comes on its own stand, and also in the auction were a couple of heavy rolling workbenches, which is also great because I've had no clear sense of what exactly I would put any of my tools on.

So I've been learning a lot about flooring, even though I can't (if I understand right) make many choices until I know the height from the subfloor to the sill. And for 104 square feet, everything I'd choose is more or less the same price. (I don't want a floor harder than the tools and workpieces I'm guaranteed to be dropping, so the Tuscan marble will have to wait for another project.)

I'd been trying to avoid it, but I have to buy a shop crane—a small hydraulic thing on wheels, usually used for pulling engines and such. I'd hoped my overhead X-Y crane would make it unnecessary, but I actually have a ton of stuff to move around that is too awkward and heavy to be lifting much. This became a serious problem because I have a storage unit to hold the new lathe and tables, and I'm actually going to stick Micro Shop in it, and there's going to be a lot of moving heavy things.

Such a long project. Imagine, being able to do projects inside!