Upfront, if you do what I did, your wife could divorce you, but I’m single, and it works very well for me.
The shop area here is the breakfast room, right off the kitchen. A large dining table is the workbench, far end of the room, with light from two large windows falling on it. It’s stout maple, and I covered it with one of those play rugs the kids grew out of, you know, with buildings and roads printed on it. It’s upside down, and the foam backing puts some give and grip on my work surface, spills only affect the back of the rug and don’t reach the table top. It’s ducttaped down so that the tape only touches the rug, not the table, because the adhesive residue from the tape is a pain to remove from finished wood.
I only need a little bit of knee room under the table to get comfortable while sitting, so elsewhere under the table is a large 16 gallon shopvac that runs my dust collection system. Also stored there is a DeWalt 734 surface planer, a tool that isn’t used often, but invaluable when you need it. It’s heavy, 60 plus pounds, so under the table, out of the way, never needing moved until use, it’s a good place for it.
To the right of the workbench, along the access “hallway” down the middle of the room, are the main tools, table saw, miter saw, and one free cabinet unit to carry a variety of other power tools, usually a router table, or dovetail jig, sometimes a sanding table. All of the cabinet tops or tool tables are precisely the same heigth, which is the same heigth as the kitchen countertops they butt to on the near end. Even though the workroom is about 9 by 12 feet, I can work on stock up to 22 feet long because the kitchen counters extend the workspace.
Under the tool cabinets are shelves for bigger power tools, nailguns, a small compresser, jigsaw, another router, cordless drill, moto-tool cases, palm sander and paper, etc.
Across the room from these is another long shelf/table, also set against the wall, and here ther
