This week I removed the wood burning furnace from the basement woodshop and have it temporarily stored in another part of the basement. While the furnace is only about 2 feet wide and about 4 or 5 feet deep the area that it mostly consumed was about a 10' X 10' in order to have a safe buffer around it. I thought 24' X 40' was a big shop but space was tightening up.
I swept its old spot and rolled the mighty Shopsmith Push-me Pull-me double drillpress over into the former furnace spot. What a huge difference it made in the general lay-out with that one smallish change. 
If we have a cold snap we will just turn on the electric heat.
I now have until fall to put up a new chimney for the furnace at its future site. That new chimney will not be inside of the house but will sit several feet from the house and possibly as far as 10 feet away. The new chimney will be inside of its own fireproof insulated housing and the line from the furnace to the chimney will be inside of a fireproof underground conduit with an ID of about 24".
I have burned wood for heat every year since 1965, sometimes in multiple locations and in about every configuration you can imagine. In all of those years I have never had a chimney fire but that doesn't mean that I haven't worried about one...
In its new location the furnace will have steel heat shields on each side and above it and also have its own fire sprinkling system. In the woodshop location I had handy hoses at two locations nearby. I'm very careful about fire possibilities.
All of this winter I have had the "big hole in the wall" that I made to move the big stuff into the new shop covered with a "quickie" closure of OSB. Now that "summer"
is here I can now open that up again and frame the opening in (I have had the treated lumber sitting by "the hole" all winter waiting to finish that job). The door frame for the 5' opening shouldn't take even me more than a couple of hours but I also have to build the insulated door first. It is going to be very nice to have a window to look out of a lot (plus a lot of natural light) and a "normal" door to open when I want. I did open the temporary covering several time this winter and while you could use the word "functional" the word "handy" never came into use. 
I still have one more configuration change to make in the woodshop this summer. There are 3 nice round cornered concrete block post down the center of the shop. One of them is very much in my way. The wall above it is not load-bearing, in fact none of the interior walls in the east wing are load-bearing. Still I want to beef up the beam that sits on that post and then remove the post. When I finish the beefed up beam will still only have about a 16' span between post. That 16 foot span is where my big table saw will sit a few feet away from my main workbench. The "swing" room will make a huge difference at the saw.
BTW, the original chimney will now become a fume vent for finishing and using stuff like contact adhesives. It always has a strong draw and in a lot of small uses it will not be necessary to run the blower.
"I love it when a plan comes together".
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