We recently moved into a new house that we designed ourselves. Included in that design was room for a basement workshop, which has so far remained in a mess full of unused tools. Near the start of this year, I finally bit the bullet and started getting it operational.
I suppose I should start in the true beginning of the shop, which would be during construction of the house. Before we moved in, due to inspector concerns, we had to basically finish the walls and ceiling of the shop due to the large double doors leading outside. His complaint was that if they were that large, then I could technically pull a lawnmower inside and work on it, which meant that gasoline might be stored within, which meant that it needed to have fire protection. Maybe that’s a sound argument for failing inspection, but it was rather frustrating at the time. This meant I had to think about all the wiring I’d need and a loose idea of how I wanted the shop arranged.
Here’s a pic of the shop during construction…
My basic idea was to have a 110v and a 220v duplex receptacle roughly every 4 feet sitting about 4 feet off the ground to account for counters. I also ran 2 quad 110v receptacles to the ceiling for anything I might want to mount there (air filter, extension cord reel, etc.) in the future. I realized too late in the process that it might be nice to have some floor outlets to allow me to run the table saw in the center of the room without snaking a power cord across the floor. Luckily the builder was accommodating and cut out those channels later on. Though they were wired up a year ago into the floor electrical boxes, I only finished them off and added the receptacles and covers a few weeks ago. Here’s a pic of the finished product, along with the cut-off of the housing.
If you’ve ever installed these particular floor outlet covers, you might note that the 3 screws used to hold down the floor plate are not the original screws. I fought with the screws that came with it for quite a while before I gave up and bought longer screws. They were so much easier to work with, so if you do happen to install a floor plate such as these, do yourself a favor and grab some longer screws.
Next up, the first cleaning…
