January | 2014 | The Lighthearted Woodworker

As with all dreams I’ve had a lot of incarnations of my dream shop, and lots of ideas to mull over in my head. What tools would I want to put in it? How would I use a Roubo type bench? How much space do I really need? With all this new space maybe I’ll take up blacksmithing as well! I’ll need a welder! Wow– I need more power! Windows! I want lots of natural light! But most barns don’t have a lot of windows. Hmmm. We don’t have a garage now, but we now we need a three car garage (in order to house the dream sports car and dream pickup truck)! Dust collection in the floor of course (thank you Vic). So many things to consider.

This rarn seems about the right size and general shape

This barn seems about the right size and general shape.

I’ve spent hours over the years staring at spots in the yard- sighting and plotting out ideal locations for a barn. I believe I’ve landed on the perfect spot:

Potential Barn Sight

So many things to dream about! It can keep you up at night! This one I can conceived one night in bed:

The Concept Shop!

Before that I had a friend help me with some basic design ideas I had and figured that would get my juices flowing, without my sketch-up skills slowing me down. Here are some of the designs he helped me create:

Barn Frame 1

Barn Frame 2

Barn Frame 3

These certainly gave me a model to play with and be able to consider space. Probably the thing I gained the most from this exercise was to realize I don’t want or need a full second floor. The third garage door makes the building a littler grander than I would like. And while I like a modern spin on traditional design, I would most likely go with a more traditional design.

What do you think? What version do you like? Leave a comment below.

The weather in the northeast and much of the entire United States has been unreasonably cold over this winter. I have several small electric heaters in my tiny basement shop, and finally found the motivation to finally rewire a 220 heater I had and now I can get it quite toasty in there. But that was nearly all the work I got done in the shop the past few weeks, outside of a good cleaning and assembling some Christmas goodies.

So I decided to stay in by the wood stove, work on my sketch up skills and design my Dream Shop!

We have talked about building a barn on the property for almost as long as we’ve owned the house. In fact, when we were looking for houses, we really were looking for barns that could be converted into a home (thank god we did not do that!). We own 10 wooded acres, we’ve attempt mini-farming and a barn only seems natural. Thankfully my wife has always been on board that this barn would also be my wood shop.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been obsessed with barns and timber frames. Being from New England we’ve had our fair share of amazing barns dotting the countryside. There is something so incredible about these structures. Although built primarily to house livestock, feed and farm tools these buildings have come to represent so much more than that. When you stop and think about went into building a barn, entirely hand built by a community, with engineering skills past on from generation to generation. Then think about the amount of trees that needed to be forested and moved, to the milling and joinery, to the actual raising. Each and every structure is an amazing feat. I could go on and on about barns…..in any case what better place to create a shop than within a timber frame barn?

I’ve gone over and over in my head what the best design for a barn/shop would be. Our property is on a hill– so a bank barn certainly seemed to make the most sense. I knew approximately the size shop I would want and that I wanted room for a 2-3 car garage, something we do not have right now. I also want to keep the size in scale with our house and the property. This helped dictate many things and I started pulling together research of barns that would fit the bill.

Barn Research

I say all of this as if I only started thinking about this idea few weeks ago, but the truth is I’ve dreamed about this for years. I love my little shop, but it is incredibly ‘cozy’. I’d love to be able to spread out and work on larger projects someday.

I drive by barns, sometimes stopping to snap some pics, and try to imagine how that would look on our property and if that would fit our needs. I’ve sketched out tons of ideas, but it was not until recently that I studied a barn that I drive by constantly and is about a mile and a half from my house.

This barn really seems to fit the bill!……….