My basement workshop

There is a fun thread over on the internet-bob list about cyclist's workshops. I finally got my basement sorta clean and took some photos.

My basement has the misfortune of being home to at least four hobbies: bicycles, woodworking/carpentry/house stuff, beer brewing, and computer servers (including the one hosting this website). Plus my lovely wife Christine likes to be able to get to the washer and dryer and store stuff down there. So it is quite the crowded place. This was taken after a period of bicycle building, so it is "bike mode" with all of the woodworking stuff pushed into the corner.

The basement is sort of in three areas. More than half of it is the multi-use area that is usually setup for wood stuff. There is a small (6' x 9') storage area that is home to PCs and lots of boxes. There is another bicycle area that has the bike workbench and all of the bikes. The photos are grouped accordingly.

Large room

The large room is home to the big workbench (roughly 9' long plus a little extension for the drill press), washer/dryer, beer fridge, and a big open floor space. There is a little bike stuff here. All of the boxes under the right workbench are holding bicycle components. There is a huge assortment of chainrings on the wall at one end. The cabinets and pegboard mostly don't have bike stuff.

You can see the table saw, jointer, and dust collector all pressed up against the far wall. Behind this is a crawl space. It is a minor dream to someday open up that space and get a bigger basement, but it would be a major project.

The trash bags in front of the tablesaw aren't full of trash, they have packing peanuts. My mom mailed me a bedframe and it was surrounded by tons of peanuts. If you need packing peanuts and live in Seattle please shoot me an email. I can't bring myself to throw these things out.

There is a beam which runs across the ceiling. As you can see clearance is limited (I'm only 5'11", my taller friends hate it down here). Even though I should easily wack my head on that beam it hasn't happened yet. Jan Heine wore a helmet when working in my basement though...

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Bike area

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The large room is really L shaped and bikes get one end of the L. From the last photo of the large room you can see your way into here. There is a small workbench (I originally made it for Christine as a planting table, someday I'll return it to her), and lots of bikes. Over the workbench there is pegboard with the bike tools.

Along one wall of the bike area (above the tandem) you'll find a bunch of non-bike stuff. From left to right we have my wiring board (all house communications come in through there), a cabinet with lots of electrical stuff and tools, and some open shelving that holds bike grease, spray paint, and other nasty stuff.

There is just enough space in the middle of this room to work on a bike. Sometimes it is tricky walking around it.

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Storage Room

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Push your way around the bikes and you get to the storage room. This is a small room with lots of shelves (and hopefully more coming once I get time to build them). In these photos the storage room is a bit of a mess because we had some puddling due to heavy recent rains. I had to pick everything off of the floor and get it to higher ground.

Bike related in this room we have a couple more boxes with parts and the tire and wheel storage (there are more under the stairs, bet you didn't notice that earlier). There are three piles of tires sorted by size. I should be selling a big selection of them at the bike swap.

At the far end of the storage room you find a small bench with 4 computers. They are: the two phred.org/bikelist.org machines (one running Windows, the other running FreeBSD), my Media Center PC, and a friend's server which lives at my house.

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