Wow, thank you very much for the warm welcome!
It will be a long and steady journey i think. Currently that McAllister Sliding Mitre saw is about the sum of my woodworking tools plus a mallet and some chisels i got from Amazon years ago when i had to fit a door in my last house but it does mean the only way is up from here.
The workshop is on the list but first i have to do some building work on the house to join the main house to the cellar via some internal stairs. Then i have to terrace the sloping garden to give SWMBO the veggie garden and greenhouse she wants. Following all that i hope to build a workshop in the shady bit she is less keen on.
Mike-
no plans as yet, although i have been stalking through the various forums and have been lifting ideas from your threads. Absolutely inspirational. I am a man that likes to do things right and your plans look like the right way to do it. So I'm planning a 6x4.5m footprint shed on a concrete base and brick plinth (3 courses!) timber frame clad in feather edge. Roof i'm not sure about, i plan to position it at least a metre from the boundary so that size and location should exempt me from building regs and planning permission but i want to keep the height down because i get on really well with the old lady next-door and don't want to ruin her view (her house backs onto ours at an angle so she looks down across our garden to the view of fields beyond.) So i was thinking of an OSB mono pitch roof clad in onduline or possible a low pitch standard roof clad in OSB and onduline. (i re -roofed my garage at my old house like that so have some experience of mangling those materials together. However having gone through your threads i can now see the correct way to keep it all watertight.)
The main stumbling block to progress at the moment is finances (the builder's quote for the work on the house was
so i figured i would do the bulk myself under supervision of Building Control and my Dad) The second issue is the imminent arrival of my first daughter (already 4 days late!)
I am keen, as i said, to make simple bits of furniture for the house and bit and pieces like that so on my list of tools to procure over the next 18 months are: Dust extraction, bandsaw, planer/thicknesser, pillar drill, table saw. Probably in that priority order but if the right tool pops up and is available then i can purchase and store in my tiny half garage until the workshop is built. And of course a variety of hand tools to finish everything off neatly!
I am very much a have a go sort of bloke, i can turn my hand to most things practical so really hope woodworking is something i can get into. I want the satisfaction of looking at something and saying "I made that.." Plus i think i will need the space to hide in occasionally.
Looking forward to chatting with you all, thank you again for the warm welcome.
James