Building a Shop

For many years I've wanted a larger wood shop. I have a couple hundred square feet in the basement that I share with the furnace, water heater, and a host of other stuff. In order to cut a 4x8 sheet of plywood on the table saw, I need to stop midway and move the table saw so the outfeed can fit eight feet of plywood. (I now make my initial plywood cuts with the circular saw.)

After much talking, my wife took it upon herself to shut me up. I believe she said something about "stopping his whining and getting him out of my basement" where she wants to have an artist studio. So she looked into a variety of things including renting (too expensive), buying an old semi-industrial space and fixing it up (the good ones are expensive, the bad ones are bad), and buying land and building. We finally wound up making an offer on 4,000 square feet of flat land in south Seattle and are costing what it would take to build a 2,000+ square foot shop with artist studios for rent on top. It turns out that it's not expensive. The land itself cost about as much as some of the nicer SUVs I see my coworkers driving. And if I've costed out the materials and labor for the actual three-story building correctly, it's only about 2x more than that. Plus we can charge reasonable rent on the studios and probably make break even in a few years.

All so I can cut a 4x8 sheet of plywood without moving my table saw.