New Room (Workshop) Design

Using our garage for my shop is ok, but the space is limited, it is not air conditioned or heated, and sawdust gets on everything else. I also want our garage to serve as a garage, so this means moving machines and cars around to reconfigure things as I work on projects and when cars are in the garage, there is not much room for equipment, much less working. Besides increasing the value of the house, I felt an extra room would be ideal for a dedicated workshop.

I spent a lot of time planning this, meeting with people and spending some money to explore the costs and feasibility. I wound up pulling the plug on this project once it reached a certain level of complication. I was willing to put up with a lot of complications and unforseen things, but I was also not wanting to be trapped by having invested too much already. Having to fight the City of Austin on some non-sensical rules about impervious cover they had was the final straw and I bailed before having committed too much money.

However, I did invest a lot of time desiging, planning and putting together a project plan. I made a detailed 3D model of my existing house, the new room and then generated visual picture of what it would look like to help both me and everyone else to see that it would not be an abomination. Below are a few of the "before" and "after" images I created.