With the walls up, it was time to figure out how to furnish and organize the new dollhouse workshop in a way that 1) wouldn’t require spending a ton of money on new furniture, and 2) won’t drive me crazy when I’m trying to work in it. My old workshop wasn’t huge and I acquired a ton of stuff for it over the 5+ years I lived there, so while it wasn’t very well organized, at least I knew where everything was. In the new workshop I have the benefit of organizing everything from scratch, but I don’t have as much cabinet space as I once did, so I wanted to be smart about where I put things.

I spent a few hours on the IKEA website and decided on the furniture I wanted. This stuff is good for a craft room because it’s modular and relatively inexpensive. My plan was to use an Alex drawer unit, a Linnmon table top, and two legs to make a desk like this.

I also wanted to get a wider drawer unit to roll under the desk and some shelving units to put at the back of the big shelf Geoff built, to take better advantage of the space. If I’d bought all this stuff new the desk parts would have added up to $274, and the shelving units are $65 each. (Not including tax!)

It turns out that San Francisco is a great market for second-hand IKEA furniture. I started trolling Cragslist, and in less than two weeks had acquired the table top, both drawer units, and one shelving unit, for $160 altogether. I would have preferred white drawers, but not enough to drive to IKEA and pay full price for them.

As you can see, the floor slopes downward. My rationale for putting a drawer unit at one end and legs at the other was that the legs could be taller than the drawers, creating a level table top. Instead of using the IKEA legs, Geoff made some for me out of pipe. He screwed two of these pipe-holding fixture thingies (sorry, no idea what they’re called) into the corners.

He then figured out the exact length each leg needed to be for the desk to be level, and cut them accordingly.

There was a risk of the drawer unit on casters rolling downhill into the legs and upsetting the desk, so we added stability by attaching the desktop to the stationary drawer unit with brackets.

And here’s the frankendesk in all its glory! I purposefully put it about 18″ from the wall to make a space where I could stand up some dollhouse kits, since there’s not really anywhere else to store them. The tabletop is 78″ long.

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Since moving back to San Francisco in October, it’s been hard to get back to work on mini projects. All my dollhouse stuff is in plastic bins in the garage, some stacked up so they’re hard to reach, and I can never find what I need. The dollhouses are all over the place and none are set up because I don’t want furniture and tiny pieces to get lost. I miss my old workshop, where I knew exactly where everything was. Blah blah blah.

A couple of weeks ago my complaining must have hit a high note because Geoff agreed to get started on the workshop he promised I could have in the garage when we decided to buy a house that didn’t have a “dollhouse room.” It’s not done yet, but we now have a room!

Our house is a Marina style, built in 1925. The garage is basically an entire first floor that the floor we live on sits on top of, and in a lot of houses like ours this has been converted into living space. We didn’t necessarily want to do that, but there’s plenty of room to close off an area for the workshop and still have space for tools and storage and a car.

Here’s how the garage started out.

Geoff used the posts as reference points to figure out where to section off the new room. The house is on a hill so there’s a big concrete ledge along one side of the garage that we needed to accommodate.

We’d originally moved most of my houses and supplies on top of the ledge, but it was all crammed in and hard for me to find what I needed. I was also concerned about really working on the houses this way — any time he does something messy in the garage they get dusty, and it would be so easy to drop and lose a little piece and never find it again.

I was able to work on the gingerbread dollhouses and my contribution to the Half Scale Yahoo Group‘s 2016 swap with this set-up, but whenever I left stuff out on the table (which is always) it risked getting knocked into or mixed up with something Geoff was working on or *gasp* thrown away. I need something more enclosed.

He started by building a shelf over the concrete ledge. We figured out what height I wanted this to be (about 40″) so I could display houses on it and easily see and reach them, but also have enough space underneath for storage.

The shelf is 16′ long and about 3′ deep — which is really deeper than is practical because I can’t reach the back without climbing on something, but the ledge dictated the dimensions.

You can see in this pic that there’s less room under the shelf on the near end than on the far end. That’s to keep the tabletop level, because the ledge (and the floor) slope toward the back of the house.

Next came the walls. These don’t reach all the way to the floor – it’s because of the length of wood Geoff bought (the verticals are 8′), but this also made it easier to deal with the floors sloping.

The drywall does go down to the floor, so you can’t tell that the studs are floating. My plan is to put a workbench/desk along the wall on the right, and then shelving on the back wall to hold paint and other supplies.

We’re not putting in a door and instead left an opening near the washer and dryer. So the room’s not completely closed off, but I think I’ll be okay with this because it gives me easy access to the sink.

And he added three bright fluorescent lights so I can see what I’m doing!

There’s still work to be done, but it’s good progress for two weeks. When it’s done I’ll get back to work on the Victorianna. Can’t wait.