On keeping a workshop

The promise has been the same for two years: this weekend I'll finally sort out the workbench. The promise broke every time, partly from inertia and partly from a quiet suspicion that the moment I imposed order on it, the room would stop being mine.

I figured out this month that the resistance wasn't to organization — it was to organizing it the way a stranger would. So I started over with a different question: what does the bench need to look like for me to walk in on a Saturday morning and start doing something inside of ten minutes?

Turns out: not much. A clear flat surface big enough for whatever's on the bench plus one tool. A peg wall where the most-used hand tools live at eye level. A single bin per project, lid off, on the lower shelf. Everything else can be a drawer or a box or even a pile, as long as it's out of the line of sight.

I'll report back in six months on whether it survived contact with real use. My guess is the system holds for everything except sanding — sanding always wins.