Sadly my 36' x 50' farm shop (mechanics, metal working, welding, blacksmithing etc) is in about the same boat.
Part of the common problem is a result of part of my past life. I've always farmed but I've also worn a lot of different hats with it. Diana and I started a family operated retail store in 1974. I had been selling wholesale to retail stores in a 13 county area in east central Indiana and was getting tired of all that driving (about 5,000 miles a month). It was a good learning experience, I've had a lot of good learning experiences.
Times turned pretty tough in this area, stores in older down-towns were closing at a frightening rate and we kept reinventing store on a fairly regular basis. The big change was a major shift from retail to service which kept us going while many of our fellow shop-keepers were failing. One of the additions was a shoe repair shop. It was an old family trade. My father did it for 18 years through the 20's and the great depression. His brother owned a shop in another town for over 40 years and his son had a shop in yet another town for maybe 15 years. As an older teen I used to hang out a lot in my uncles shop so I had a good base knowledge to begin.
I enjoyed the work, some of it is more like some wood working than you might think. Most of it is more of an art than a mechanical process. I stayed with it for over 20 years. I finally retired from the shop and a couple of other things to just the farm about 1996 when I was turning 55. I sold my big machinery but kept all of my smaller stuff and hand tools. I know they always show a cobbler with just a knife and a hammer but there is a LOT more to it than that.
After about a dozen years I kind of got to missing the work and the human interaction and decided to start a retirement shop catering to mostly western boots. I started buying up the big machinery needed for grinding and various stitching and sewing machines. It took a couple of years to accumulate good stuff at a decent price but I was in no hurry. I was starting to get it all sat up in two seldom used rooms in what we call the west wing of the house.Then came a quadruple bypass in 2013...
and a long recovery. It was kind of a wake up call and I decided that I had other things I wanted to do more at that time. The shop rehab project got parked and sat for a good while. We had several horses of our own and we started doing some boarding. Our client horses vary from about 8 to a dozen, give or take. We started doing some traveling, I was collecting antique tractors and adding stuff to the wood shop. I have spent a lot of the last 30 years doing genealogy research and that was some of our traveling.The shoe stuff is stored, some in the west wing, some in the wood shop and some in the farm shop. I have been torn between setting it up in another location or I did consider selling much of it but I just don't really want to sell it. I got to looking around for a space and I have a little barn fairly near the house that I have looked at before. It's around 600 sq. ft. in 3 rooms and if I add about 100 sq. to one back corner I think everything will fit fine in two rooms. Boots and shoes don't require all of the "swing room" that boards do.
It will get my retirement shop sat up in sort of "man cave" fashion and free up needed space in the farm shop and the wood shop. I have one corner of the wood shop half sat up as a small upholstery area and I will move that out to the new shop space too since all of the sewing machines etc. will be there.
I have some other stuff in the wood shop I want to move out there. I have some lapidary and jewelry making stuff there and I have a ceramics kiln and the makings of a potters wheel that could find a corner out there.
It will be very nice to have that space in the wood shop. Just thinking about it makes me want to go down there and wave a long board around...
