Your home repair headquarters may be a kitchen drawer with some nails, screws, spare hardware for who knows what, and an oddball assortment of tools — with a stretch of kitchen counter for a work surface. But it’s not hard or expensive to create a basic and more functional home shop — a sturdy, well-lit work surface with some organized storage that can tuck into a corner of the basement or garage.
What seems nearly blinding elsewhere is about right in a shop, as in 200-watt bulbs or double banks of fluorescents. Light is important for safety. It also helps your work quality, for example, so you can cut up to but not over a thin pencil line. Clamp-lights are handy because you can clip them to overhead floor joists or exposed studs, and move them around as needed to see your work clearly without casting shadows.
If your new shop space is short on outlets for lights and power tools, you often can make do with a fused plug strip that can handle several power tools — or their chargers if you prefer battery-powered equipment. Theoretically, you should have power for every possible tool. But because no one uses more than one at a time, a single 20-amp circuit should be adequate. If your home shop plans escalate to large stationary power tools like table saws and planers, you’ll probably need to add an extra circuit with its own breaker.
Aside from observing basic safety guidelines on your own, it’s wise to childproof the work area by controlling access, for instance, with a keyed lockset on the door to the basement stairs. It’s also wise to disable power tools when you’re not around by tripping the circuit breaker controlling their power supply. Some stationary power tools come with keys that allow you to lock the starting mechanisms. If you’ll be using any materials with a poison warning on the label, keep them in a locked cabinet.
If you plan to work with strong solvents like furniture strippers, provide adequate ventilation to protect yourself, and to keep fumes from spreading into living spaces. If you can’t gain cross-ventilation with two open windows, install an exhaust fan in one, and set up the work so fumes carry away from you to the outside. In warmer weather, of course, it’s better to tackle projects like that outside. A vent fan also helps control dust when cutting and sanding wood if you don’t have power tools with built-in dust-collection bags.
For light duty, try a hollow-core door glued and screwed to a 2-by-4 frame — maybe hinged to the garage wall so you can fold it away. For heavier duty, you might use 3/4-inch plywood — one sheet cut in half, the pieces glued and screwed together, and reinforced with a 2-by-4 frame. That kind of assembly can take a beating. You can buy leg kits if you make your own bench top. There are also fold-away benches like the Black and Decker Workmate (about $90 for a substantial model), and stand-alone benches like Gorilla Rack’s 4- and 5-foot models with drawers (about $100 and up).
With a free wall, you could revert to the old-fashioned but still practical panel of pegboard. Hundreds of hangers, shelves, bins, and tool holders are available from many companies. There are clips for plastic jars so you can see what’s inside, mounts for screwdrivers, circular saw blades, rulers, wrenches and more. (Several accessories are pictured on the Web at diamondlifegear.com.) On a smaller scale, you could use a plastic tackle box, or even an empty egg container — at least to separate the screws from the nails. Or you could make you own. One of the niftiest I’ve seen: jelly jars (about 100 of them) with metal lids screwed to the bottom edges of ceiling joists with each glass carrying nuts, bolts, washers, you name it. You can see what’s inside, and simply unscrew a jar from it’s mounted lid for access.
The right collection depends on what repairs and improvements you need to do. Basics include a hammer, small wood saw and hacksaw, large and small straight and phillips head screwdrivers, an all-purpose wrench — like a locking pliers, or plumber’s slip-joint model — and a starter set of nails, screws, nuts and bolts. Many home repair kits on the Web have most of what you’ll need (minus a saw) in one handy bundle.
