Plusses and Minuses of Working from your Apartment Patio

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Okay, so I found Gaya lumber which was great, but I still like the idea of free so I cut a deal with the BX (our version of K Mart on the base) and they let me raid them for a couple of pallets every now and then. I haul them back to the apartment building in the wife’s Kia Soul (Yes, I can actually fit a couple of them in the back) then grab me a Mtn Dew…a couple of my children…and we sit outside the building and tear down pallets. We then throw the broken down lumber into a grocery shopping cart (there are always several parked in the lobby of our building) and haul it all up to the apartment for me to work with out on the Patio.

If any of you have looked at my “shop” pics you’ll see that my patio isn’t small, but it certainly was never intended to be used as a woodworking shop. The only thing that stays permanently out there is my little Black and Decker work bench and the wooden platform that I put together to raise it up 4 to 5 inches (I’m 6’3”/1.84m). Everything else has to be hauled back and forth from the laundry room and out to the patio when I want to work…and then hauled back inside when I’m done. I made the mistake of complaining about this to my Jedi Master, WMD2006, here on Lumberjocks and he basically said “Wah, you’re still actually able to get outside and make some sawdust so suck it up.” And I’ll have to say, in the end, I agree.
I’ve been asked what tools does an apartment woodworker keep and I’ll have to tell yall that I keep pretty much what any other garage woodworker has. I tried to think in terms of space saving, and I bought a tool that took very little space but proved to be a waste of money in the long run. So now I just buy what everyone else does and I haul it back and forth. I will say that tools that come with cases or carrying bags are preferred because it makes it easy to haul them, and the mess they make is alot less as I track through the wife’s clean livingroom!
So now I’ve got tools. So time to get started on the end tables. This would have been about 5 months back and I still only had hand power tools to work with but I felt that I could cut a straight line with what I had. Yeah, not so much. My first attempt at the End Tables crashed and burned dying a horrible death. I had nothing with which to really clean up the boards…nothing to clean up the edges….not a catastrophe but I realized I needed to regroup and replan. So I took to Youtube.

I’ve taken to watching alot of Woodworking for Mere Mortals and Jays Custom Cabinets videos. Those guys break down woodworking to a level that a talking monkey like me can understand. And you can tell that they genuinely enjoy what they are doing and that just makes it all the more fun to learn from them. And from them I realized that I had not been taking enough care to prep the boards well enough for assembly and joining. My RO Sander became my best friend while I waited for my Porter Cable power planer to arrive! I made sawdust of epic proportions! I also ended up making a fair bit of noise….which I was going to hear about shortly….

Source: LumberJocks.com

Plusses and Minuses of Working from your Apartment Patio