Shop space / Man cave

The house pictured is my favorite local "Bat Cave."  Southern facing, ability to open up the doors and take in the sunshine - perfect!  There are a few other houses that are similar in the area, but this one is my current favorite.  A 5 car garage with a house over it would be ideal for my needs.  Ok, why did I call it a Bat Cave?  Phrase came from bro Greg, regarding some of the house designs I've come up with over the years:  "Sure, it is cool, but it is like Batman's Batcave - guys all dig it, but you could never get a woman to live there with you."
You have to admit, he has a point.  My current "shop" is garage based, with work spilling into the driveway whenever the sun makes an appearance.  Most hobbyist woodworkers are in the same situation - whether their shop is in a basement or garage, there just isn't enough space.  There are some interesting alternatives out there though.  First, you can build a detached shop, separate from your home.  Second, you could rent space for a shop.  Third, you could learn to make do with the space you have available.

And finally, you could share a shop with someone, either formally, or informally.  If I lived closer, The Shop People in Portland at SE Grand and Oak have an amazing shared setup.  Plenty of quality tools, and you simply pay a low monthly membership fee.  Somewhat closer to home and with a diverse tool selection is Portland TechShop which also offers classes in using some of the more high-tech tools.  Classes taken in more traditional venues are another option - most community colleges have woodworking classes, and there are woodworking specific schools nearly everywhere too.  The NW Woodworking School founded by Gary Rogowski and the Oregon College of Art & Craft are probably the two most famous locally.  But, schools don't really solve the shop space problem.  So, no answers for the masses, just a review of options

Free Wood, part 2, ugly furniture is MADE of wood

Yep, it is true! Even the ugliest piece of wooden furniture is still, well, wood. I can't believe how long it took me to figure that one out. Really, what triggered these entries on free wood (other than the acquired habits of a scrounger) is this article about recycling an ugly table into a padded bench. Yep, the table in the picture. ModHomeEcTeacher saw a padded bench, I see a bunch of lumber! If those legs are 2x2s (well, the shrunk down dimensional lumber version of a 2x2) than that bench is 4' long and just the planks on top are 8 inches wide, and nearly an inch thick. The side planks look to be 6 inches wide and nearly as long. I figure there is more than 8 board feet of usable wood in this table. She paid $13.99 for it at Goodwill - huge rookie mistake.
I would pay a maximum of... ...nothing. Yep, nada, zip, zilch, zero, nunca, niente. Oh, I would take it rather than reject it (for the price of a zero without a rim) as nice wide boards can be used for something, eventually. But the wood doesn't look to be anything too special. So where do I do my free & sometimes cheap furniture shopping?
The first two places are pretty competitive: the Craigslist.org free section & Freecycle.org. Lots of cheap people out there & being first is often the only criteria for scoring a deal. The Craigslist furniture and garage sale sections can also yield fruit. Oh, in the garage sale section look for estate sales that aren't being given by professionals. Best is when you turn up furniture that isn't currently in style, or is incomplete in some way. 1950's Early American roughcut thick Maple coffee tables, a solid wood footboard without matching headboard - that sort of thing. Sure, the Craigslist materials section is also great, but spotty - I did pay 50 cents a board ft for some roughsawn Walnut once though, so it is worth checking. To really mine online sources it is all about the keywords you use to search the ads. I like search keywords like: "wood", "broken", "table", "walnut", "oak", "maple", "hardwood" and so forth. Using online resources to pre-shop just makes sense. Look for local papers online too - often their classified sections are the same as the ones in the birdcage liner & searchable, too.
Goodwill or any of the other great service organizations that have storefronts can be possible sources, but you will pay more than you need to. The biggest problem you are going to have is when you get a piece of furniture that is too good to disassemble, and you end up repairing an antique. I hate it when that happens! (grin)

Garage Epoxy Floor

Can you imagine a garage so empty that you could pressure wash it? Only when moving / before moving in, right? Generally you may not go to these extremes, but in this case it was a necessity...
The previous owner had a large number of cats and took care of the cat box problem by making his own giant sized one and putting it in the garage.

Here is how to duplicate his (genius!) process:

1) Make a large frame of 2x6 lumber with a scrap of vinyl flooring for a bottom
2) Put box in the middle of one garage bay
3) Fill it with cat litter and ignore until you move...
So you can see why pressure washing was needed.

Oh! Least I forget - when the garage floor was poured in 1977, kids were allowed to walk, ride bikes, draw and play games like tic-tac-toe in the wet concrete. What fun! The gift of permanent pre-pubescent lithic art!

So what to do about this two pronged problem? A smell better left to the imagination & chasms carved into solid concrete by prehistoric preteen Morlock sub creatures?

The answer to both was sealing the well-defiled floor. There are several DIY epoxy products available on the market. A 2 part, 2 1/2 gallon "pro" epoxy kit sized for the typical two car garage was selected - it also came with colored paint flakes to be sprinkled on the wet paint.

This was the process: Pressure wash the garage floor thoroughly. Be sure to use a very high powered gas pressure washer and run the motor constantly for the entire 1 day rental period. (Get full use of the rental by pressure washing driveway, sidewalks, and curbs.) No other pressure washer is loud enough to allow you to meet your neighbors while making a great first impression! Do avoid hitting the sheet rock on the walls as even a casual flick of the wand will rip a hole right through it. Next, allow the concrete to dry. Attempt to fill cracks, craters and other gouges in concrete with vinyl concrete patch. Abandon fruitless effort (next time fill with liquid epoxy mixed thin enough to self level?) allow to dry, proceed to next step. Mask edges and wood expansion joint between the two car bays. Divide the color chips into smaller quantities to ensure that there will be enough for the entire floor / to make sure coverage is reasonably even. Mix epoxy in 5 gallon bucket. Brush edges, roller epoxy onto floor, spreading color chips as we (Thanks Dad (pictured) and Greg!) painted our way out of the garage.
That is all there is to it! Sure the more aggressive prep methods might be indicated if the floor has a lot of oil or grease embedded, but so far so good! The concrete patch may not have done more than fill the deepest of the gouges, but the epoxy paint and color chips did a pretty good job of camouflaging things. And the overpowering olfactory reminder that the garage was once a temple to the end result of feeding and confining cats? Gone!