Leaving Empty Wall Space: A Common Pitfall in Organization and Productivity

One thing I'm not good at in my house or in my shop is leaving empty wall space. I have this tendency to try to just fill every space with as much stuff as possible, making it efficient or whatever. But having a blank wall can be a huge benefit. For instance, right now you're paying attention to me; you're not looking at stuff in the background. You're focusing on what I'm saying to you, and if I wanted to get really serious and make a big point, I could do it right now because I've got your attention.

When it comes to organizing my shop, I try to fill every available space with tools, materials, or storage solutions. This approach can lead to clutter and disorganization, making it difficult to find what I need when I need it. By leaving empty wall space, I can create a more organized and functional workspace. In this particular area of the shop, I've created a system that allows me to easily access my tools and materials.

I recently moved some containers into a new location, and I'm trying out a different way of organizing them. Some people stack them up in a stand so you can roll the whole thing around and have them all vertically. While this approach works for some, it's not ideal for me. Instead, I've found a container that fits on top of my miter station, providing additional storage and keeping everything organized.

One area of the shop that still needs attention is the pile of tools and materials in the corner. To tackle this, I reached out to my friends at Wall Control, who sent me enough panels to cover the entire 4x8 section of that wall. They also included some Dads (dividers) to help organize the space. With these new panels and dividers, I'm excited to start organizing the area and making it more functional.

A key principle in organizing my shop is to view the workspace as a dynamic system that will change over time. This approach allows me to make decisions without worrying about whether they'll work out or not. By embracing this mindset, I can create a space that adapts to my needs and makes it easier for me to focus on my projects.

In terms of specific priorities, I have two main goals for the clean room: creating a space that meets my needs and ensuring that everything has a designated home. To achieve these goals, I need to consider the constraints of the space, including volume, objects, and interactions between them. For example, do I need to work in front of or from the side of certain materials? Do I have to access them from the top?

To help me stay organized, I've created a simple worksheet that outlines my thoughts and considerations for each space. This tool has been incredibly helpful in laying out the space and identifying areas where I can improve. For those interested, the link to this worksheet is available in the description below.

Finally, as I wrap up this video, I want to acknowledge the importance of leaving room for creativity and flexibility in my organization system. While having a clear plan is essential, it's also necessary to leave space for adjustments and changes as needed. By embracing this mindset, I can create a workspace that not only meets my needs but also supports my growth and evolution as a maker.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI'm pretty excited because today this entire space is going to start to change after seven years of adding tools and projects and junk this space is completely out of control but I've been working on kind of a system of thought to be able to organize any space with a whole bunch of stuff in it we got a lot of work to do let's give it a shot over the past few months I've been renovating this entire basement to make it a place where our entire family can hang out it had a bunch of junk in it before and when I cleared this out all that junk had to go somewhere and most of it ended up here in my office which is now a wreck but it made me realize that this used to be my storage room which means I don't have a storage room but I obviously need a storage room and so that led me to think well this space is not utilized very well why don't I build a storage room right there but if all that stuff comes here then that means this stuff has to be redone and maybe it can't move Mo because it has to connect to the exhaust or this Po's in the way so then I have to rethink how I do this section which means this stuff then has to move here but I can't put stuff here because it's a walkway and it goes that way and there's already a bunch of junk here that needs to be taken to the recycling center and I haven't taken that because of this and because of that and it just goes around in a big circle so I decided that I need to stop trying to spin all these plates in my head and I need to come up with some sort of a system that's mine and I'm sure other people have done the exact same thing but I need to to write out a formula for myself that I can apply to each one of these sections and the space as a whole I think my little plan of thought will actually work with any space like I'm thinking about my walk-in closet but today I want to go through a couple of areas in the shop as examples and then we're going to actually apply it to The Woodworking area and move everything around and see if it gets better Bob from the future here this video ended up being pretty long but covering a whole lot of stuff and I really want it to be useful for you so I'm going to take my process here and boil it down to a worksheet that you can download for free to help organize your spaces I'll show it to you later on but of course I've got a little disclaimer I want to throw out there we're different you and I are different we have different spaces with different stuff we do things differently and so the way I think about this may not be the way that you think about it in fact I know for a fact that a lot of you watch Adam Savage and he does a lot of organization stuff and it's great but it may not be the way you do it it's definitely not the way I do a lot of it and that's cool that's good that we're different and my hope is that this kind of framework idea thing is just something that we can all apply to our own situations but I want to give you an example think about sorting Lego if you're not a Lego person this won't even matter to you but if you are this might be a divisive conversation there's two ways that most people sort their Lego bricks one is by color and one is by function which to me is a much better way to do it so by color people literally just pick all of the orange bricks and they put them in a box and they do that for every single color so that they know where to find the orange ones when they want one but for me I actually like function a lot better because I need a sloped piece or a tire and once I have the sloped pieces I can pick out the orange brick if that's what I'm looking for and neither one of those things are wrong if you're building a tiger then orange matters the most if you're building a race car then function matters the most those are both just different ways to use the same tools and that's kind of the same situation with the shop okay that's out of the way so now I get to tell you the idea for this entire place and it starts with splitting it into smaller rooms I'm blessed with a very large shop it's about 1100 ft and I know a lot of people immediately are like why in the world would you cut that into smaller spaces again it's the Lego sorting idea it's what I need right now and So the plan is to take what is a big space where everything is connected and everything runs over each other and split it into spaces that are a little bit more dedicated for things that I'm interested in today I want to break this into three big areas maybe four one is the wood shop this is a very important part of what I do and I don't want to change that too much but I do want to contain it then I need storage so I want to take this area and actually turn it into a dedicated sealable kind of storage organization thing where I can store a whole bunch of stuff in kind of a small space and behind me I actually want to build a room that's sealed off from the rest of the space to keep dust out cuz that is what I'm calling the clean room that's where I want to put all of my 3D printers my vinyl cutters my large format printer all of that stuff that needs to be away from the shop but I want it to have a dedicated space now there's a lot of stuff to consider in this big space and I can't do it all at one time and I can't even do it all in this one video so that leads me to my first big decision point which is what is my top singular priority for the entire space first and for me personally that's I want to be able to walk in here and immediately make something I want to remove the barriers to get an idea out through a tool so being able to easily make stuff is probably my top priority after that you have to come up with a secondary priority it's not top priority but it's still really important and for me that's presentation I need to be able to show you what I'm making which means I need to make it easier for you to focus on what I'm doing I need to remove background noise and distraction and bad lighting and bad sound and things like that I need to make it shootable so for me those are the two big priorities for the entire space and I'm going to have to do that same decision for each one of the individual spaces as I get there it's really important that you get your main priority and then probably a secondary priority maybe a third but honestly if you go past that nothing's a priority it's just a bunch of stuff that you want that all weighs the same you need to figure out what weighs the most in your mind and work from there but even once you have those priorities it's still pretty pretty hard to deal with a bunch of stuff so the next step is to aggressively remove things like aggressively like most makers this is actually kind of difficult for me I never want to throw away a scrap because I might need it uh there's some weird motor that might be useful someday there's a project piece that's left over that I don't want to get rid of because it was a cool memory this tool was useful one time so maybe I should just keep it around there's all these things that kind of make us want to hold on to stuff and some things yes you should hold on to but if you haven't used something in a year or two or longer if you've had a piece of wood that you've never actually used it's just cool and it's been around maybe look at just getting rid of it find somebody else that can use those things find a place that you can donate them I know for me one of the things I've never done is recycle metal but we have a metal recycling place here I've got tons of off cuts of aluminum and steel and so one of my jobs is to take all of that get it out of the shop and get a few dollars for it I've also got woodworking tools that I rarely use but my sister has become a wood worker and she could use the planer or the lathe and so I'm going to take those to her house and let her use them and if I ever need them I'll just go borrow them and as far as the scrap thing here's a little tip and I don't know where I heard this but if you find a piece of wood that's cool and you want to hang on to it as a scrap just take a pencil and write the date on the bottom of that piece then when you're cleaning out your shop in a couple of years if you find scraps that have been there for a year or two and you haven't used them put them in the burn pile or find another woodworker that might want them now there's a whole lot more stuff that I plan on getting rid of I just can't do it all today but so far it's made a huge difference there is so much more space in every area there's fewer things for my mind to try to figure out what to do with I mean my honest advice would be just give things away get rid of stuff have less stuff to deal with and it's going to make all this easier now we need to move on and start applying the idea to the storage area now the storage area that I'm talking about is right behind me it's from this Pole right here where I'm going to build the wall for the clean room all the way to the lumber storage which I'll probably have to rebuild and change eventually but it's the area that you see in this Frame right now as I start to figure out what I need for this space and figure out what the priority is for it I want to make sure that I'm verifying upward to the big picture the big picture was I want to be able to walk in here and make stuff with very little friction and I want to be able to shoot it so as long as my choice is here work with those top level priorities we're good basically we don't have a storage room in our house and our attic is hot and kind of hard to get to so I need to create an area that is storage for the shop but also for some things in our house that we want to keep but we don't really need out all the time I want to compress as many things as possible into this space the problem there is that I actually have to be able to get to all of it as well so I can't just smash things up together with no way to access them so my two big priorities for here are as much as possible and accessible and I mean obviously people want to store as much stuff as possible that sounds like kind of a duh thing to say but it's really important because if you have shelves and then you have containers that go on those shelves but there's a bunch of empty space around them like these I'm actually kind of wasting space here all of this area right here should be inside of a container so I could make it useful but instead stuff just gets stuck there and it's not a great option I need to make sure that the containers I choose are more rectangular and not this goofy slanted shape so that led me to start looking at containers and I picked a couple that were pretty rectangular this is a pretty good small option and I looked at a really big option as well but anyway one of the problems I have is I start trying to come up with Solutions too early I don't even know what's going to go here yet I know that I'm going to have archival storage Christmas decorations and my old stuff I'm going to have raw materials like paint and epoxy and things like that and functional items things I need to get out to use tools that I don't use very often but I want to keep and unfortunately those categories are just too vague for me to start figuring out which containers I need and which shelves to build and stuff like that so unfortunately this whole section is going to have to wait the storage area is going to be right there so the next thing to think about is the new clean room and I don't even know where the walls are going to go yet and all of that depends on the priorities that I set for this space the space that I'm thinking of is going to be roughly from here all the way to that back wall so it's a pretty big space and that's so that I have enough room in there to keep it flexible but essentially the priorities for that room are to have a clean space where I can put all of the 3D printers and large format printers and viny Cutters maybe even my electronic station things that I want to be able to work on but keep dust away from them so as a priority for this space being able to make things more often with less friction that matches my top level priority for the whole shop my second level priority is good as well because I want to be able to shoot in here that's why this room is the size that it is so I can have several machines and an Electronics desk but still have room around those things to be able to shoot the videos I do kind of have a third priority for this area but it's not really about organization it's more about discipline for myself I want it to be focused I don't want it to be like the rest of the shop that's kind of mingled together and there's piles of things that didn't get put away I want this space to be tidy and minimal and honestly I I kind of want it to look cool I have an idea for making the room look really cool but we'll get to that when we build the room but thinking through this those priorities that you have for a space are really just the first step they are the thing that you want to get to the ideal but you have to deal with the actual situation and that's where you have to start talking about constraints and by constraints I mean the stuff that you have to work around the things that you have to consider and I've kind of broken those down into three categories first is the volume and I literally mean the volume the volumetric space that you are in is a constraint you have to work around walls you have to work around plumbing and the ceiling and AC ducks and all that stuff but that defines your space your volume in this particular volume I've got a lot of things I have to think about I've got ducting that runs through only part of it I've got the plumbing there's a bedroom above this so I have to figure out some sort of soundproofing and then where does the Wall go does the wall hit this pole or not maybe it goes on this side of it does it sit under this beam or on the side of it there's a lot of different physical things that will Define the volume because that's going to be the first step after that we have to talk about the objects in the volume and objects are the next constraint literally the stuff that's going to be in the space in the storage space I've got a bunch of shelving and containers those are the objects in this space I'm going to have a really big printer and a bunch of smaller printers and a desk for electronics and all of the pieces and parts and tools that go with that that station those are all objects that I have to figure out how to fit into the volume so you got the space you've got the stuff that's in the space and the third constraint for me is interaction it's how you deal with the tools or the things in the room on this particular tool I'm going to stand here to use it but it's not just that if I'm pushing something through it could very possibly stick off this way and if it's long it's going to stick off that way so I can't put this in a corner this has to have a particular interaction and every tool is going to have its own so the way that I'm actually trying to keep track of all this and figure this out for each one of these spaces is just on paper I'm making lists I'm writing down the tools that I want to put in here and then next to that what the interaction for that tool is I need to be able to get to a printer from the front and probably from the back so that I can load in filament I've got an absolutely gigantic printer that's going to go in here as well and it's so big that I don't want it to be stuck in one place so I have to make some sort of a cart for it to be able to kind of roll around a little bit I'm also probably going to have some resin printers in here and they're kind of messy so those need to be on a Surface that's easy to clean obviously we're going to have to have really good Lighting in this space but also probably task lighting at the electronic station and maybe for working on printers all of those interactions are Downstream from the objects that are in the space and the objects in the space are Downstream from what the space actually is that's how I came up with those three constraints the volume has stuff and that stuff has interaction you got to figure all those things out together I've thought a lot about this and I could continue to talk about it but I can't actually do any of the work I don't have walls yet but we've got to be able to test this out we've got to be able to take our priorities and our constraints and start to create solutions to problems and we can do that in the wood shop in general the wood Shop's going to stay about the same except it's going to feel smaller because there's going to be a wall right here but that wall is going to require both of these band saws and the miter station to move in and that is our first problem to solve we have more objects than we have volume so something's got to give but before we solve that problem let's talk about our priorities for the space the top priority is exactly the same as the entire space immediate access to tools so I can make things with no friction that means open walkways everything needs to be able to be moved and a big area on the floor for assembling things priority number two is also the same I want to be able to shoot in here without it being distracting but look behind me I'm totally failing at this right now there's all sorts of stuff behind me that's going to draw your eye instead of to me or to what I'm making the entire place needs to be tidier or at least better looking I feel like I'm failing at the third priority as well and that priority is for this entire space to be energizing to me I want to feel empowered inspired to make stuff and one of the reasons I don't is because of piles of stuff these are all unfinished projects and when I look at them I kind of feel a tension like I've got work to do but I don't really have time to do that work I've got things that I never put away that I need to put away and so I've got to figure out a way to organize stuff like this so it doesn't stress me out and the space can be inspiring we got our priorities check but now we got to think about our constraints and the first one being the volume I have to decide what constraints I am putting on my choices that's the point of those constraints is things that I have to have and everything else is going to work around them in my case I think I have two constraints in here one is this big open open space which you can't really see it needs to be a big enough consistent open space that I can build a piece of furniture on the floor right here I just want to have that work area the other thing is the table saw with a table saw or pretty much any other saw you need to have infeed space and out feed so that you can push something in and get it out the other side and right now I've got plenty in both directions and it's fantastic unfortunately I don't have enough room in any other direction to move these things so the table saw and the workbench have to stay right here so that means that everything else in this area has to work around this empty space and those two giant objects that means I don't have a whole lot of space to work with now most of the things in here are already on Wheels which means they're very easy to move around and there's a few things that they don't really need to live in the shop I can roll them in when I need to so I'm thinking about making kind of like a parking lot over by the storage area for a couple of these tools to get them out of the way in fact let's go ahead and do that this video is sponsored by betterhelp and they've been sponsoring videos for about 6 months now and the reason I wanted to do that is to bring visibility to therapy as a good thing as a helpful tool a lot of people will be able to find a therapist local to them or get a recommendation from somebody that trust if you can't find a therapist that's where betterhelp comes in the whole point of betterhelp is that you go to the website you fill out a little questionnaire about what your needs are and who you are and usually in about 48 hours they will match you up with a licensed therapist from there you can meet with that therapist on a schedule that works for you in a way that works for you and if you find that it's not a great fit you can swap to a different therapist at any time for any reason at no cost and you will definitely find somebody that's a good fit for you they have a network of over 30,000 licensed therapists with tons of Specialties the point of therapy is to help you through things that you don't know how to navigate yourself and to put an objective voice into your life to help with that stuff and if that sounds even remotely useful to you in your life please go check it out hit the link down in the description or go to betterhelp.com iltms that's going to give you 10% off your first month of therapy just talk to somebody see if it's a good fit for you big thanks to better help for sponsoring this videos but to you watching make sure you get the help that you need and thanks for being here there's a couple less things to deal with for now next we got to think about interactions now obviously every tool you have to be able to stand in front of it some of them you need to be able to move pieces of material around it but that's not a big deal here because pretty much everything can be rolled out I do want to minimize the amount of movement that I have to put on any tool if you move them in and out a lot it's going to get really tiring and annoying so I just want to be able to pull them away from a wall and make sure that I can use them but I also have to make sure that I have a power available to those tools when I move them out when I moved into the house I wired up the shop so I've got power pretty much every place that I would need except right in the middle of the rooms and these are really handy for that this is basically an extension cord on a reel and so you've got 25 ft or so of extension that you can take to where you need it so I've got a couple of these mounted on the ceiling and that gets you power anywhere you need there's another thing about interactions in a shop that I think a lot of people just forget about and that's the table height of everything I like to have all of the tables really close to the same height and that's so that everything can act as infeed or outfeed for other tools my table saw my work table my miter saw that table over there the little cabinet that's underneath the drill press they're all at the exact same height so at any point I can use any of them to help with any task of course it looks nice to have everything kind of on the same plane but it's also just really handy if you need a little extra table you can just roll things together and you know they're going to match up you can't do this with every tool but if you can swing it I would suggest it okay we've talked about the priorities we've talked about the constraints and now it's my favorite part time to actually start making stuff better now we can start creating Solutions for the problems and we're going to go through these one at a time and just get them out of the way so one problem that we can solve is the air compressor I've got a long hose so I can have it set anywhere you could run piping if you wanted to this air compressor can literally be anywhere in the shop that makes the most sense and it doesn't make sense to have it here eating up floor space I've also noticed that I have this like problem with theoretical storage I have a bunch of cabinets up here that have basically nothing in them they're taking up a bunch of space they're un organized and all this stuff could go in a much smaller container in a place that it makes sense so these are coming down they'll go to Goodwill and then I'll free up a whole big space to make something useful so I think we've established that getting rid of stuff is a fantastic way to get started with organizing and honestly you can just kind of keep doing it throughout the process but now we have to start figuring out how to place all of these objects in this space and of course there's a million ways to do this but I like to go to Fusion now of course to be fair you don't have to use 3D modeling software for this you can do it on a piece of paper the important thing is that you measure your space you want to measure all of the walls and the doors obviously but you also want to think about things that are immovable you've got AC ducting you've got power on the walls you might have wiring running through the joists any of those things that you're going to have to work around you want to measure where they are so you can put them in your model or on your layout plan whether it's on paper or on the computer now I like to go to Fusion just because 3D modeling is kind of how I think I've made a course teaching people how to do this and it may seem like it's complicated but it's really not and it can be very very helpful and one of the big advantages to having a model like this or having a really nice piece of paper with all these dimensions on it is that you can come back to it later if you're thinking about getting a new tool or building a new table you can go back to your model and actually verify if it will fit if it will do the thing that you want it to do in the space that you have so spending the time to get the measurements and get this model right absolutely worthwhile so I started by measuring everything I measured all of the walls I measured where this beam is where the ducting is where the poles are because all of those things are going to be either integrated in or I'm going to have to work around them to build the walls that I want to put in here and then after that I had to measure all of the tools if you wanted to you could get really exact about all this and actually model these things in fact I have models of most of these objects but in this case I just got the outer cubic dimensions of them I don't worry about the fact that this is shaped like an a I just want to know what the footprint is and how tall it is so I just measure those three things in fact with a lot of these tools I didn't just measure the tool I measured kind of a given space around it that I know I need to have just to make sure that I'm building in interaction and eventually I ended up with this a list of all of the tools that I want to have in this space their footprint dimensions and then separately their height because if you're just going to be making a model from above on a piece of paper the height doesn't really matter but in my case I wanted to be able to actually have a three-dimensional block for each one of these tools so that was pretty important so the 3D model was super helpful for testing for like moving things around virtually to see if they would fit to make sure that there was enough walkway and all that type of stuff but eventually you just have to start moving stuff around and we have one big thing that might be a problem and it's that gigantic but awesome Miner saw station so let's talk about this thing it's pretty fantastic we actually have build plans if you want to build one of your own and it's been great here even though I've kind of wasted a lot of the space underneath it but to move it over there is actually going to be kind of difficult this is going to be difficult just because it wasn't made to move it's a station it's supposed to be in one place So eventually making this mobile might be the thing to do but for now we're just going to take all the storage up top separate it out so that we can just take the saw and the side tables and move the whole thing over there now before I try to drag that thing all the way over here I didn't talk about why I'm moving it here in the first place one because I'm going to be putting a wall where it is currently but why it's going on this wall in particular well let me just show you on the tool I mentioned earlier about saws needing infeed and outfeed and on a miter saw you have potential to cut on either side of the blade so my Hope was that I could have at least 8 ft this way and at least 8 ft this way well it turns out that this wall from that corner to that corner is just under 17 ft which means if I put the saw in the middle I should have plenty of room on the outsides but one of the advantages of maybe making this station Mobile in the future is if I need more than 8 ft on one side I can actually pull it away from the wall and then I've got tons of outfeed or infeed or whatever on that side okay I can't put it off any longer I got to try to move that thing now I don't know if this is the right place for this but without modifying it it's the only place that it's going to fit in this room and this was like the big Central immovable object that I had to kind of work around now I've got to get the other saws and the cart and all that stuff to fit in the spaces around this luckily they're mobile so that should be a lot easier this is the bigger of my two band saws the other one is a little bench top that can kind of go anywhere cuz it's for small stuff and typically if you were going to resaw boards you would want to have a lot of outfeed and infeed so that you can put long pieces is through I don't really do that very often and if I ever need to I can roll it out into this space but for now I'm going to place it so that I can walk up to it and use it on stuff right here but even in placing it here one of the things I had to think about was it being in the way of my infeed and outfeed for this saw so I had to make sure that this would fit above any material that was on this table which it probably will and it's not in the way of it coming out so if I were to put a long board on here it doesn't run into the band saw and that's a good thing another thing about a tool like this is that on this side of the blade you could actually have a really long piece of material but on this side it's always going to run into this part of the saw so if this part of the saw is up against a wall it's no big deal and that may not seem like a very big deal but that's exactly why I put the tool on that side it's up against a wall if I put it over here that would not be the case this other band saw is like a benchtop one it's small and unfortunately it's sitting on a table that is not mobile so I could either make that table mobile or I could avoid using footprint in the shop for this thing at all check this out I actually do have room over here if I wanted to just move the table I could stick it right there and it would work fine or I could use that space for something else and take advantage of some of this empty space that I've created up here I think I can put that little saw right here and still get to it just fine now the problem with that is this fence when I built this minor saw station I put these fences here with the track in it so that I can have a stop block and it works great but you don't really need a fence here for anything so these days a lot of people put the track in the table top so that you have more of a clear surface and if I do that then I can put the band saw right here and move it forward if I need to I moved the drill press over here and it's worked out great this whole both sides looking nice and open and everything has enough room and then I moov the A-frame cart and it does not work in the model I had that big A-frame cart up against what's going to be the new wall and it was fine but in real life it actually comes into the room way more than I want it to so I think I'm going to have to rethink this entire end one of my constraints in here which is probably a constraint for you as well is the breaker boxes I can't just completely cover them up with something that's permanent I have to be able to get to them to flip Breakers that's part of why I put the drill press over here to leave a big open space well since I have to move the A-frame I can try to put it here and since it's on Wheels if I need to get to the breaker boxes I can roll it out of the way let's give it a shot I don't really like it in the corner plus it cuts into my outfeed from the miter saw so I don't think that's going to work but it also made me realize that I was trying to avoid moving the TV cuz it's anchored into a con create wall but I don't even use that TV there's no reason that it needs to be right there so if I take the TV down and allow both of those things to just go somewhere else the cart can go right there and that's kind of the perfect spot for it turns out I had a constraint that I wasn't even aware of but now that I've identified it I can ignore it I tried out a few different things and I think I've got it how it works but looking at it it's almost exactly like it was before except everything is moved over just a little bit and I was trying to figure out why why this works but it didn't before and I think I understand if you put something up against a wall it kind of creates a perimeter a boundary out from that wall which is where the free space in the room starts if you put something next to it that comes at the same distance from the wall it doesn't change that boundary it feels about the same but if you try to do that to a blank wall you can really feel it so imagine this new wall that's going to go right here if this is the outer boundary of the room it's a pretty good amount of space but if I were to put something in in front of this that boundary moves in right here which actually really starts to change the free space on the floor one thing I'm not good at in my house or in my shop is leaving empty wall space I have this tendency to try to just fill every space with as much stuff as possible to make it efficient or whatever but having a blank wall can be a huge benefit like for instance right now you are paying attention to me you are not looking at stuff in the background you are focusing on what I'm saying to you and if I wanted to get really serious and make a big point point in the video I could do it right now because I've got your attention but I'm not going to do that let's go move some stuff around all right remember these containers well a lot of people will stack them up in some sort of a stand so you can roll the whole thing around and you have them all vertically and I'll probably do that eventually because I think that's a great idea but for now I've already got something that holds them all and it's made to fit on the miter station so instead of putting it on top I think we can put it under now eventually I'll probably get tired of Leaning down to take out containers on the bottom but I'm not that old yet so I'll deal with it when when I get there for now I'm going to screw this in on both sides and then I've got some extra space in the bottom where I can just kind of jam some other stuff the entire shop looks way better and is far more organized but there's still a pile right here and a couple of other piles of stuff that needs a home so we're going to put it on that wall and to do that I reached out to my friends at wall control and they sent me enough of these panels to cover that whole 4x8 section and a bunch of dads to organize it so we're going to start organ izing that knowing full well that it will change a lot over the next couple of months in fact it'll probably just keep changing but step one we got to get these things on the wall every part of this has a long way to go but I think it's good to think of your workspace whatever it is as a moving kind of constantly changing thing that way any decisions you make don't have to be permanent and you don't have to worry if they don't work out my goal for this particular space was to be able to walk in and immediately use the tools have direct access with as little friction as possible and I wanted it to be good to look at I want it to be easy to shoot in here to show you what I'm doing now even though I've got a long way to go on both of those things I think it's way better than it was and I'm actually really excited to start making some projects in this particular setup obviously the wood shop is going to keep changing it's going to be a work in progress for a long time but next up I've got to jump into the clean room now I want to run through that really quickly just in case you want to write these things down the little guiding principles that I've been using for trying to organize these spaces I have my two big priorities for that room I know exactly what I want the room to be and anything else is going to be lower priority it's not important enough to put in place then I've written down all of the constraints those are the volume literally the space that you're working in it's all the stuff that goes in there the objects that need to exist in that space and the interactions how you interact with all of those objects do they have to have filament loaded into them do you need to work in front of them or from the side do you have to have access from the top all that stuff matters when you're laying out of space keeping all this stuff in your head is actually kind of hard and it was really helpful for me to write it down so like I mentioned before we made a simple worksheet that you can download for free to help organize your thoughts and get all the stuff down for every space that you're working with and then you can literally lay out the space and all the stuff in it these are free the link for them is down in the description if you're interested go check them out and I hope it's helpful I've got a lot left to do so if you've got more suggestions or ideas about the clean room leave them down below I would really appreciate it that's it for this one thanks for watching now it's time for bloopers paint and epoxy and stuff that I need to get to plus just what was the other container the other oh yeah yeah yeah from machine to machine or area to area or something like that area area to area how Inspire I feel how Inspire I was almost there I'm sorry for the cough not for messing upI'm pretty excited because today this entire space is going to start to change after seven years of adding tools and projects and junk this space is completely out of control but I've been working on kind of a system of thought to be able to organize any space with a whole bunch of stuff in it we got a lot of work to do let's give it a shot over the past few months I've been renovating this entire basement to make it a place where our entire family can hang out it had a bunch of junk in it before and when I cleared this out all that junk had to go somewhere and most of it ended up here in my office which is now a wreck but it made me realize that this used to be my storage room which means I don't have a storage room but I obviously need a storage room and so that led me to think well this space is not utilized very well why don't I build a storage room right there but if all that stuff comes here then that means this stuff has to be redone and maybe it can't move Mo because it has to connect to the exhaust or this Po's in the way so then I have to rethink how I do this section which means this stuff then has to move here but I can't put stuff here because it's a walkway and it goes that way and there's already a bunch of junk here that needs to be taken to the recycling center and I haven't taken that because of this and because of that and it just goes around in a big circle so I decided that I need to stop trying to spin all these plates in my head and I need to come up with some sort of a system that's mine and I'm sure other people have done the exact same thing but I need to to write out a formula for myself that I can apply to each one of these sections and the space as a whole I think my little plan of thought will actually work with any space like I'm thinking about my walk-in closet but today I want to go through a couple of areas in the shop as examples and then we're going to actually apply it to The Woodworking area and move everything around and see if it gets better Bob from the future here this video ended up being pretty long but covering a whole lot of stuff and I really want it to be useful for you so I'm going to take my process here and boil it down to a worksheet that you can download for free to help organize your spaces I'll show it to you later on but of course I've got a little disclaimer I want to throw out there we're different you and I are different we have different spaces with different stuff we do things differently and so the way I think about this may not be the way that you think about it in fact I know for a fact that a lot of you watch Adam Savage and he does a lot of organization stuff and it's great but it may not be the way you do it it's definitely not the way I do a lot of it and that's cool that's good that we're different and my hope is that this kind of framework idea thing is just something that we can all apply to our own situations but I want to give you an example think about sorting Lego if you're not a Lego person this won't even matter to you but if you are this might be a divisive conversation there's two ways that most people sort their Lego bricks one is by color and one is by function which to me is a much better way to do it so by color people literally just pick all of the orange bricks and they put them in a box and they do that for every single color so that they know where to find the orange ones when they want one but for me I actually like function a lot better because I need a sloped piece or a tire and once I have the sloped pieces I can pick out the orange brick if that's what I'm looking for and neither one of those things are wrong if you're building a tiger then orange matters the most if you're building a race car then function matters the most those are both just different ways to use the same tools and that's kind of the same situation with the shop okay that's out of the way so now I get to tell you the idea for this entire place and it starts with splitting it into smaller rooms I'm blessed with a very large shop it's about 1100 ft and I know a lot of people immediately are like why in the world would you cut that into smaller spaces again it's the Lego sorting idea it's what I need right now and So the plan is to take what is a big space where everything is connected and everything runs over each other and split it into spaces that are a little bit more dedicated for things that I'm interested in today I want to break this into three big areas maybe four one is the wood shop this is a very important part of what I do and I don't want to change that too much but I do want to contain it then I need storage so I want to take this area and actually turn it into a dedicated sealable kind of storage organization thing where I can store a whole bunch of stuff in kind of a small space and behind me I actually want to build a room that's sealed off from the rest of the space to keep dust out cuz that is what I'm calling the clean room that's where I want to put all of my 3D printers my vinyl cutters my large format printer all of that stuff that needs to be away from the shop but I want it to have a dedicated space now there's a lot of stuff to consider in this big space and I can't do it all at one time and I can't even do it all in this one video so that leads me to my first big decision point which is what is my top singular priority for the entire space first and for me personally that's I want to be able to walk in here and immediately make something I want to remove the barriers to get an idea out through a tool so being able to easily make stuff is probably my top priority after that you have to come up with a secondary priority it's not top priority but it's still really important and for me that's presentation I need to be able to show you what I'm making which means I need to make it easier for you to focus on what I'm doing I need to remove background noise and distraction and bad lighting and bad sound and things like that I need to make it shootable so for me those are the two big priorities for the entire space and I'm going to have to do that same decision for each one of the individual spaces as I get there it's really important that you get your main priority and then probably a secondary priority maybe a third but honestly if you go past that nothing's a priority it's just a bunch of stuff that you want that all weighs the same you need to figure out what weighs the most in your mind and work from there but even once you have those priorities it's still pretty pretty hard to deal with a bunch of stuff so the next step is to aggressively remove things like aggressively like most makers this is actually kind of difficult for me I never want to throw away a scrap because I might need it uh there's some weird motor that might be useful someday there's a project piece that's left over that I don't want to get rid of because it was a cool memory this tool was useful one time so maybe I should just keep it around there's all these things that kind of make us want to hold on to stuff and some things yes you should hold on to but if you haven't used something in a year or two or longer if you've had a piece of wood that you've never actually used it's just cool and it's been around maybe look at just getting rid of it find somebody else that can use those things find a place that you can donate them I know for me one of the things I've never done is recycle metal but we have a metal recycling place here I've got tons of off cuts of aluminum and steel and so one of my jobs is to take all of that get it out of the shop and get a few dollars for it I've also got woodworking tools that I rarely use but my sister has become a wood worker and she could use the planer or the lathe and so I'm going to take those to her house and let her use them and if I ever need them I'll just go borrow them and as far as the scrap thing here's a little tip and I don't know where I heard this but if you find a piece of wood that's cool and you want to hang on to it as a scrap just take a pencil and write the date on the bottom of that piece then when you're cleaning out your shop in a couple of years if you find scraps that have been there for a year or two and you haven't used them put them in the burn pile or find another woodworker that might want them now there's a whole lot more stuff that I plan on getting rid of I just can't do it all today but so far it's made a huge difference there is so much more space in every area there's fewer things for my mind to try to figure out what to do with I mean my honest advice would be just give things away get rid of stuff have less stuff to deal with and it's going to make all this easier now we need to move on and start applying the idea to the storage area now the storage area that I'm talking about is right behind me it's from this Pole right here where I'm going to build the wall for the clean room all the way to the lumber storage which I'll probably have to rebuild and change eventually but it's the area that you see in this Frame right now as I start to figure out what I need for this space and figure out what the priority is for it I want to make sure that I'm verifying upward to the big picture the big picture was I want to be able to walk in here and make stuff with very little friction and I want to be able to shoot it so as long as my choice is here work with those top level priorities we're good basically we don't have a storage room in our house and our attic is hot and kind of hard to get to so I need to create an area that is storage for the shop but also for some things in our house that we want to keep but we don't really need out all the time I want to compress as many things as possible into this space the problem there is that I actually have to be able to get to all of it as well so I can't just smash things up together with no way to access them so my two big priorities for here are as much as possible and accessible and I mean obviously people want to store as much stuff as possible that sounds like kind of a duh thing to say but it's really important because if you have shelves and then you have containers that go on those shelves but there's a bunch of empty space around them like these I'm actually kind of wasting space here all of this area right here should be inside of a container so I could make it useful but instead stuff just gets stuck there and it's not a great option I need to make sure that the containers I choose are more rectangular and not this goofy slanted shape so that led me to start looking at containers and I picked a couple that were pretty rectangular this is a pretty good small option and I looked at a really big option as well but anyway one of the problems I have is I start trying to come up with Solutions too early I don't even know what's going to go here yet I know that I'm going to have archival storage Christmas decorations and my old stuff I'm going to have raw materials like paint and epoxy and things like that and functional items things I need to get out to use tools that I don't use very often but I want to keep and unfortunately those categories are just too vague for me to start figuring out which containers I need and which shelves to build and stuff like that so unfortunately this whole section is going to have to wait the storage area is going to be right there so the next thing to think about is the new clean room and I don't even know where the walls are going to go yet and all of that depends on the priorities that I set for this space the space that I'm thinking of is going to be roughly from here all the way to that back wall so it's a pretty big space and that's so that I have enough room in there to keep it flexible but essentially the priorities for that room are to have a clean space where I can put all of the 3D printers and large format printers and viny Cutters maybe even my electronic station things that I want to be able to work on but keep dust away from them so as a priority for this space being able to make things more often with less friction that matches my top level priority for the whole shop my second level priority is good as well because I want to be able to shoot in here that's why this room is the size that it is so I can have several machines and an Electronics desk but still have room around those things to be able to shoot the videos I do kind of have a third priority for this area but it's not really about organization it's more about discipline for myself I want it to be focused I don't want it to be like the rest of the shop that's kind of mingled together and there's piles of things that didn't get put away I want this space to be tidy and minimal and honestly I I kind of want it to look cool I have an idea for making the room look really cool but we'll get to that when we build the room but thinking through this those priorities that you have for a space are really just the first step they are the thing that you want to get to the ideal but you have to deal with the actual situation and that's where you have to start talking about constraints and by constraints I mean the stuff that you have to work around the things that you have to consider and I've kind of broken those down into three categories first is the volume and I literally mean the volume the volumetric space that you are in is a constraint you have to work around walls you have to work around plumbing and the ceiling and AC ducks and all that stuff but that defines your space your volume in this particular volume I've got a lot of things I have to think about I've got ducting that runs through only part of it I've got the plumbing there's a bedroom above this so I have to figure out some sort of soundproofing and then where does the Wall go does the wall hit this pole or not maybe it goes on this side of it does it sit under this beam or on the side of it there's a lot of different physical things that will Define the volume because that's going to be the first step after that we have to talk about the objects in the volume and objects are the next constraint literally the stuff that's going to be in the space in the storage space I've got a bunch of shelving and containers those are the objects in this space I'm going to have a really big printer and a bunch of smaller printers and a desk for electronics and all of the pieces and parts and tools that go with that that station those are all objects that I have to figure out how to fit into the volume so you got the space you've got the stuff that's in the space and the third constraint for me is interaction it's how you deal with the tools or the things in the room on this particular tool I'm going to stand here to use it but it's not just that if I'm pushing something through it could very possibly stick off this way and if it's long it's going to stick off that way so I can't put this in a corner this has to have a particular interaction and every tool is going to have its own so the way that I'm actually trying to keep track of all this and figure this out for each one of these spaces is just on paper I'm making lists I'm writing down the tools that I want to put in here and then next to that what the interaction for that tool is I need to be able to get to a printer from the front and probably from the back so that I can load in filament I've got an absolutely gigantic printer that's going to go in here as well and it's so big that I don't want it to be stuck in one place so I have to make some sort of a cart for it to be able to kind of roll around a little bit I'm also probably going to have some resin printers in here and they're kind of messy so those need to be on a Surface that's easy to clean obviously we're going to have to have really good Lighting in this space but also probably task lighting at the electronic station and maybe for working on printers all of those interactions are Downstream from the objects that are in the space and the objects in the space are Downstream from what the space actually is that's how I came up with those three constraints the volume has stuff and that stuff has interaction you got to figure all those things out together I've thought a lot about this and I could continue to talk about it but I can't actually do any of the work I don't have walls yet but we've got to be able to test this out we've got to be able to take our priorities and our constraints and start to create solutions to problems and we can do that in the wood shop in general the wood Shop's going to stay about the same except it's going to feel smaller because there's going to be a wall right here but that wall is going to require both of these band saws and the miter station to move in and that is our first problem to solve we have more objects than we have volume so something's got to give but before we solve that problem let's talk about our priorities for the space the top priority is exactly the same as the entire space immediate access to tools so I can make things with no friction that means open walkways everything needs to be able to be moved and a big area on the floor for assembling things priority number two is also the same I want to be able to shoot in here without it being distracting but look behind me I'm totally failing at this right now there's all sorts of stuff behind me that's going to draw your eye instead of to me or to what I'm making the entire place needs to be tidier or at least better looking I feel like I'm failing at the third priority as well and that priority is for this entire space to be energizing to me I want to feel empowered inspired to make stuff and one of the reasons I don't is because of piles of stuff these are all unfinished projects and when I look at them I kind of feel a tension like I've got work to do but I don't really have time to do that work I've got things that I never put away that I need to put away and so I've got to figure out a way to organize stuff like this so it doesn't stress me out and the space can be inspiring we got our priorities check but now we got to think about our constraints and the first one being the volume I have to decide what constraints I am putting on my choices that's the point of those constraints is things that I have to have and everything else is going to work around them in my case I think I have two constraints in here one is this big open open space which you can't really see it needs to be a big enough consistent open space that I can build a piece of furniture on the floor right here I just want to have that work area the other thing is the table saw with a table saw or pretty much any other saw you need to have infeed space and out feed so that you can push something in and get it out the other side and right now I've got plenty in both directions and it's fantastic unfortunately I don't have enough room in any other direction to move these things so the table saw and the workbench have to stay right here so that means that everything else in this area has to work around this empty space and those two giant objects that means I don't have a whole lot of space to work with now most of the things in here are already on Wheels which means they're very easy to move around and there's a few things that they don't really need to live in the shop I can roll them in when I need to so I'm thinking about making kind of like a parking lot over by the storage area for a couple of these tools to get them out of the way in fact let's go ahead and do that this video is sponsored by betterhelp and they've been sponsoring videos for about 6 months now and the reason I wanted to do that is to bring visibility to therapy as a good thing as a helpful tool a lot of people will be able to find a therapist local to them or get a recommendation from somebody that trust if you can't find a therapist that's where betterhelp comes in the whole point of betterhelp is that you go to the website you fill out a little questionnaire about what your needs are and who you are and usually in about 48 hours they will match you up with a licensed therapist from there you can meet with that therapist on a schedule that works for you in a way that works for you and if you find that it's not a great fit you can swap to a different therapist at any time for any reason at no cost and you will definitely find somebody that's a good fit for you they have a network of over 30,000 licensed therapists with tons of Specialties the point of therapy is to help you through things that you don't know how to navigate yourself and to put an objective voice into your life to help with that stuff and if that sounds even remotely useful to you in your life please go check it out hit the link down in the description or go to betterhelp.com iltms that's going to give you 10% off your first month of therapy just talk to somebody see if it's a good fit for you big thanks to better help for sponsoring this videos but to you watching make sure you get the help that you need and thanks for being here there's a couple less things to deal with for now next we got to think about interactions now obviously every tool you have to be able to stand in front of it some of them you need to be able to move pieces of material around it but that's not a big deal here because pretty much everything can be rolled out I do want to minimize the amount of movement that I have to put on any tool if you move them in and out a lot it's going to get really tiring and annoying so I just want to be able to pull them away from a wall and make sure that I can use them but I also have to make sure that I have a power available to those tools when I move them out when I moved into the house I wired up the shop so I've got power pretty much every place that I would need except right in the middle of the rooms and these are really handy for that this is basically an extension cord on a reel and so you've got 25 ft or so of extension that you can take to where you need it so I've got a couple of these mounted on the ceiling and that gets you power anywhere you need there's another thing about interactions in a shop that I think a lot of people just forget about and that's the table height of everything I like to have all of the tables really close to the same height and that's so that everything can act as infeed or outfeed for other tools my table saw my work table my miter saw that table over there the little cabinet that's underneath the drill press they're all at the exact same height so at any point I can use any of them to help with any task of course it looks nice to have everything kind of on the same plane but it's also just really handy if you need a little extra table you can just roll things together and you know they're going to match up you can't do this with every tool but if you can swing it I would suggest it okay we've talked about the priorities we've talked about the constraints and now it's my favorite part time to actually start making stuff better now we can start creating Solutions for the problems and we're going to go through these one at a time and just get them out of the way so one problem that we can solve is the air compressor I've got a long hose so I can have it set anywhere you could run piping if you wanted to this air compressor can literally be anywhere in the shop that makes the most sense and it doesn't make sense to have it here eating up floor space I've also noticed that I have this like problem with theoretical storage I have a bunch of cabinets up here that have basically nothing in them they're taking up a bunch of space they're un organized and all this stuff could go in a much smaller container in a place that it makes sense so these are coming down they'll go to Goodwill and then I'll free up a whole big space to make something useful so I think we've established that getting rid of stuff is a fantastic way to get started with organizing and honestly you can just kind of keep doing it throughout the process but now we have to start figuring out how to place all of these objects in this space and of course there's a million ways to do this but I like to go to Fusion now of course to be fair you don't have to use 3D modeling software for this you can do it on a piece of paper the important thing is that you measure your space you want to measure all of the walls and the doors obviously but you also want to think about things that are immovable you've got AC ducting you've got power on the walls you might have wiring running through the joists any of those things that you're going to have to work around you want to measure where they are so you can put them in your model or on your layout plan whether it's on paper or on the computer now I like to go to Fusion just because 3D modeling is kind of how I think I've made a course teaching people how to do this and it may seem like it's complicated but it's really not and it can be very very helpful and one of the big advantages to having a model like this or having a really nice piece of paper with all these dimensions on it is that you can come back to it later if you're thinking about getting a new tool or building a new table you can go back to your model and actually verify if it will fit if it will do the thing that you want it to do in the space that you have so spending the time to get the measurements and get this model right absolutely worthwhile so I started by measuring everything I measured all of the walls I measured where this beam is where the ducting is where the poles are because all of those things are going to be either integrated in or I'm going to have to work around them to build the walls that I want to put in here and then after that I had to measure all of the tools if you wanted to you could get really exact about all this and actually model these things in fact I have models of most of these objects but in this case I just got the outer cubic dimensions of them I don't worry about the fact that this is shaped like an a I just want to know what the footprint is and how tall it is so I just measure those three things in fact with a lot of these tools I didn't just measure the tool I measured kind of a given space around it that I know I need to have just to make sure that I'm building in interaction and eventually I ended up with this a list of all of the tools that I want to have in this space their footprint dimensions and then separately their height because if you're just going to be making a model from above on a piece of paper the height doesn't really matter but in my case I wanted to be able to actually have a three-dimensional block for each one of these tools so that was pretty important so the 3D model was super helpful for testing for like moving things around virtually to see if they would fit to make sure that there was enough walkway and all that type of stuff but eventually you just have to start moving stuff around and we have one big thing that might be a problem and it's that gigantic but awesome Miner saw station so let's talk about this thing it's pretty fantastic we actually have build plans if you want to build one of your own and it's been great here even though I've kind of wasted a lot of the space underneath it but to move it over there is actually going to be kind of difficult this is going to be difficult just because it wasn't made to move it's a station it's supposed to be in one place So eventually making this mobile might be the thing to do but for now we're just going to take all the storage up top separate it out so that we can just take the saw and the side tables and move the whole thing over there now before I try to drag that thing all the way over here I didn't talk about why I'm moving it here in the first place one because I'm going to be putting a wall where it is currently but why it's going on this wall in particular well let me just show you on the tool I mentioned earlier about saws needing infeed and outfeed and on a miter saw you have potential to cut on either side of the blade so my Hope was that I could have at least 8 ft this way and at least 8 ft this way well it turns out that this wall from that corner to that corner is just under 17 ft which means if I put the saw in the middle I should have plenty of room on the outsides but one of the advantages of maybe making this station Mobile in the future is if I need more than 8 ft on one side I can actually pull it away from the wall and then I've got tons of outfeed or infeed or whatever on that side okay I can't put it off any longer I got to try to move that thing now I don't know if this is the right place for this but without modifying it it's the only place that it's going to fit in this room and this was like the big Central immovable object that I had to kind of work around now I've got to get the other saws and the cart and all that stuff to fit in the spaces around this luckily they're mobile so that should be a lot easier this is the bigger of my two band saws the other one is a little bench top that can kind of go anywhere cuz it's for small stuff and typically if you were going to resaw boards you would want to have a lot of outfeed and infeed so that you can put long pieces is through I don't really do that very often and if I ever need to I can roll it out into this space but for now I'm going to place it so that I can walk up to it and use it on stuff right here but even in placing it here one of the things I had to think about was it being in the way of my infeed and outfeed for this saw so I had to make sure that this would fit above any material that was on this table which it probably will and it's not in the way of it coming out so if I were to put a long board on here it doesn't run into the band saw and that's a good thing another thing about a tool like this is that on this side of the blade you could actually have a really long piece of material but on this side it's always going to run into this part of the saw so if this part of the saw is up against a wall it's no big deal and that may not seem like a very big deal but that's exactly why I put the tool on that side it's up against a wall if I put it over here that would not be the case this other band saw is like a benchtop one it's small and unfortunately it's sitting on a table that is not mobile so I could either make that table mobile or I could avoid using footprint in the shop for this thing at all check this out I actually do have room over here if I wanted to just move the table I could stick it right there and it would work fine or I could use that space for something else and take advantage of some of this empty space that I've created up here I think I can put that little saw right here and still get to it just fine now the problem with that is this fence when I built this minor saw station I put these fences here with the track in it so that I can have a stop block and it works great but you don't really need a fence here for anything so these days a lot of people put the track in the table top so that you have more of a clear surface and if I do that then I can put the band saw right here and move it forward if I need to I moved the drill press over here and it's worked out great this whole both sides looking nice and open and everything has enough room and then I moov the A-frame cart and it does not work in the model I had that big A-frame cart up against what's going to be the new wall and it was fine but in real life it actually comes into the room way more than I want it to so I think I'm going to have to rethink this entire end one of my constraints in here which is probably a constraint for you as well is the breaker boxes I can't just completely cover them up with something that's permanent I have to be able to get to them to flip Breakers that's part of why I put the drill press over here to leave a big open space well since I have to move the A-frame I can try to put it here and since it's on Wheels if I need to get to the breaker boxes I can roll it out of the way let's give it a shot I don't really like it in the corner plus it cuts into my outfeed from the miter saw so I don't think that's going to work but it also made me realize that I was trying to avoid moving the TV cuz it's anchored into a con create wall but I don't even use that TV there's no reason that it needs to be right there so if I take the TV down and allow both of those things to just go somewhere else the cart can go right there and that's kind of the perfect spot for it turns out I had a constraint that I wasn't even aware of but now that I've identified it I can ignore it I tried out a few different things and I think I've got it how it works but looking at it it's almost exactly like it was before except everything is moved over just a little bit and I was trying to figure out why why this works but it didn't before and I think I understand if you put something up against a wall it kind of creates a perimeter a boundary out from that wall which is where the free space in the room starts if you put something next to it that comes at the same distance from the wall it doesn't change that boundary it feels about the same but if you try to do that to a blank wall you can really feel it so imagine this new wall that's going to go right here if this is the outer boundary of the room it's a pretty good amount of space but if I were to put something in in front of this that boundary moves in right here which actually really starts to change the free space on the floor one thing I'm not good at in my house or in my shop is leaving empty wall space I have this tendency to try to just fill every space with as much stuff as possible to make it efficient or whatever but having a blank wall can be a huge benefit like for instance right now you are paying attention to me you are not looking at stuff in the background you are focusing on what I'm saying to you and if I wanted to get really serious and make a big point point in the video I could do it right now because I've got your attention but I'm not going to do that let's go move some stuff around all right remember these containers well a lot of people will stack them up in some sort of a stand so you can roll the whole thing around and you have them all vertically and I'll probably do that eventually because I think that's a great idea but for now I've already got something that holds them all and it's made to fit on the miter station so instead of putting it on top I think we can put it under now eventually I'll probably get tired of Leaning down to take out containers on the bottom but I'm not that old yet so I'll deal with it when when I get there for now I'm going to screw this in on both sides and then I've got some extra space in the bottom where I can just kind of jam some other stuff the entire shop looks way better and is far more organized but there's still a pile right here and a couple of other piles of stuff that needs a home so we're going to put it on that wall and to do that I reached out to my friends at wall control and they sent me enough of these panels to cover that whole 4x8 section and a bunch of dads to organize it so we're going to start organ izing that knowing full well that it will change a lot over the next couple of months in fact it'll probably just keep changing but step one we got to get these things on the wall every part of this has a long way to go but I think it's good to think of your workspace whatever it is as a moving kind of constantly changing thing that way any decisions you make don't have to be permanent and you don't have to worry if they don't work out my goal for this particular space was to be able to walk in and immediately use the tools have direct access with as little friction as possible and I wanted it to be good to look at I want it to be easy to shoot in here to show you what I'm doing now even though I've got a long way to go on both of those things I think it's way better than it was and I'm actually really excited to start making some projects in this particular setup obviously the wood shop is going to keep changing it's going to be a work in progress for a long time but next up I've got to jump into the clean room now I want to run through that really quickly just in case you want to write these things down the little guiding principles that I've been using for trying to organize these spaces I have my two big priorities for that room I know exactly what I want the room to be and anything else is going to be lower priority it's not important enough to put in place then I've written down all of the constraints those are the volume literally the space that you're working in it's all the stuff that goes in there the objects that need to exist in that space and the interactions how you interact with all of those objects do they have to have filament loaded into them do you need to work in front of them or from the side do you have to have access from the top all that stuff matters when you're laying out of space keeping all this stuff in your head is actually kind of hard and it was really helpful for me to write it down so like I mentioned before we made a simple worksheet that you can download for free to help organize your thoughts and get all the stuff down for every space that you're working with and then you can literally lay out the space and all the stuff in it these are free the link for them is down in the description if you're interested go check them out and I hope it's helpful I've got a lot left to do so if you've got more suggestions or ideas about the clean room leave them down below I would really appreciate it that's it for this one thanks for watching now it's time for bloopers paint and epoxy and stuff that I need to get to plus just what was the other container the other oh yeah yeah yeah from machine to machine or area to area or something like that area area to area how Inspire I feel how Inspire I was almost there I'm sorry for the cough not for messing up\n"