Planning your workshop interior

The most common mistake is starting with the cabinets. Start with the walls: measure every wall length, and mark what cannot move — doors, windows, gates, power outlets, compressed-air outlets and drains. These decide where the furniture can go, long before taste decides where it should go.

Then think in zones. Dirty work — grinding, cutting, washing — belongs in one place; assembly, electronics and fine work in another. Put dusty work near extraction and the gate, and bring power and air to where the zones actually end up — an extension lead across the floor is a trip hazard that never stays temporary.

Remember the space in front of the furniture too: a fully extended drawer plus you in front of it needs about a metre of clear floor. A bench you cannot reach is just a shelf.

And if you run a shop that customers visit, the furniture is also your face outwards: the customer who sees a tidy wall with everything in its place draws their own conclusions about the work being delivered. So does the customer who sees the opposite.

Drawer cabinets are the workhorses: hand tools, bits, measuring tools — everything you use daily, sorted shallow so you see it all from above. Door cabinets take the big and the ugly: machines, cans, what should not sit out. Tall cabinets give the most volume per square metre of floor and take long tools and protective gear. Wall cabinets and tool panels lift the light stuff off the bench, leaving the worktop free for work.

Then the corner — the square metre that usually sits unused. A corner cabinet turns the dead zone into storage and lets the worktop continue unbroken around the corner instead of stopping against a blind wall.

The worktop is what ties the modules together into one installation. Lengths follow the module widths, so joints land on a cabinet — not in mid-air.

The quiet advantage of a modular system only shows later: the installation is not locked. Need more drawers next year, or another workstation as the shop grows, and new modules slot into the same system — you build on instead of replacing.

A rough rule that holds in most workshops: about ten per cent of the equipment gets daily use — the rest sits. That tenth deserves the best real estate: the drawer right by the work zone, the hook at shoulder height on the panel. Everything else can live further away without you noticing.

Then distribute by height: heavy and frequent goes low — in drawers where you lift with a straight back. Light and rare goes high — in wall cabinets and top shelves. On the tool panel, what you grab most hangs between shoulder and eye height, grouped by task, not by shape.

And keep one cabinet on wheels: a mobile drawer cabinet rolls to the job with the tools in it, and parks under the bench afterwards. That turns a dead corner into active space — and saves you a hundred trips back and forth in a day.

Finally the boring part that counts: anchor tall cabinets to the wall. A fully loaded cabinet that tips over forgives nothing.

Wood is the forgiving choice: gentle on the parts you put down, and scratches and dents can be sanded away once the top has lived a few years. Stainless steel wins where things spill — oil, solvents and water wipe straight off, and the surface tolerates chemistry wood does not.

Many end up with both: stainless over the wash zone, wood where things are bolted. The tops follow the module widths, so the combination costs nothing extra in planning — just put the right top over the right zone.

Everything above can be done with a folding rule and paper — but you do not have to. Our 3D planner draws your room to size: drag modules along the walls and they snap into place, and the planner watches the things that are easy to forget — that the cabinets actually join, that the corner is solved properly, and that the small parts tying the installation together come along.

When the layout stands, you have a complete parts list — and it can be sent straight to us as an enquiry, and we reply with a price for the whole package. Moving a cabinet in the planner costs ten seconds. Moving it after delivery costs considerably more.