How many of us have suffered this fate: the basement, or garage, workshop that is a shared space with other uses, gets taken over?

My shop is in a part of my basement that is a bit of a walkway to the washer & dryer. It houses the circuit breaker panel directly over my workbench. The telephone and cable TV drops are right next to the electrical panel. Plus, it is situated directly under my kitchen. So you can imagine the rat’s nest of plumbing and wires that go through my space.

Due to a plumbing job, my space has been taken over by the detritus of copper pipes and solder that represents my attempt to fix a leaky spigot whose outlet is also directly over my workbench. Come to think of it, that seems like abysmally poor planning on the part of my home’s builders.

Anyway, I’m not really good as sweating solder joints for plumbing, but I’m good enough at it that I refuse to call a plumber for something as simple as a spigot replacement. But I’m bad enough at it that I take two full days to accomplish what a plumber could do in two hours, even if said plumber took a leisurely coffee break in the middle of the job.

So I haven’t done any woodworking in quite some time. But I do have some projects on tap:

• New table saw base with better dust containment
• Make a wing of the table saw into my router table
• Build a new rolling storage cabinet for some of my larger power tools, and a rolling base to set them on when I use them

Yeah, it’s all shop projects. But they’re things I’ve needed to get to for quite some time, based on experience and observation during past projects.

I’m hoping that once the month of May is past, I’ll get to these. May is loaded with events in my family, including my birthday, my son’s birthday, Mothers Day, and my father’s birthday. We spend most of May either driving across town, or hosting events for which others drive to us.

In the meantime, I have a few blog posts stored up that I’ll share soon.