I'm making a proper plan for what I do with the toolshed this year as the days get longer and the weather improves. I've measured the floorplan, which comes out at 2.17m x 3.75m, which is what this post's title alludes to. (That's 87.5 square feet for you lovely yanks.) Luckily, the shed's walls are relatively high at 2.30m (7.5 feet), so I want to use that vertical space as much as possible. The problem is that this shed must serve many purposes for this household. It's where we keep our bicycles, our freezer overflow1, our large tools, and I want to use it for my woodworking as well. So, I drew a plan in Figma.
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The freezer is our "cold storage," if you will. Thank you, I'm here all night, folks!
I started with a top-down view of the usable space. Each pixel represents one millimeter in real life, so the floor plan is 3750 x 2170 pixels. This made it super easy to put the real measurements on the plan and ensure that things would actually fit in the space. For example, the freezer is 55 x 55 cm in real life, and the door swings out another 50 cm. That's perfectly represented on the plan in Figma and allowed me to move it around as a Frame object to see where it would fit best. Unfortunately, not all items in the shed are perfectly square, like the bikes. I measured their longest edges as 180 cm long and 60 cm wide. Even though you can kind of fold the bikes up in real life, it's better to be conservative on the plan and ensure the freezer door can always open, for example.
One issue I ran into with this top-down view is that it's actually quite difficult to find representations online of things like bikes, table saws, etc., in the correct perspective. As you can see, I settled on labeled boxes for things I couldn't steal from Pinterest, as it would have taken me an inordinate amount of time to draw myself. It also quickly became apparent that I would need to start thinking in three dimensions to fit everything in, so I also made a view facing the back wall.
For this view, I had to take so many more measurements. Protip: Always measure and write down all three dimensions, or you'll go back and forth between the toolshed a lot. To start with the obvious, the wood storage on the far left of this back wall is staying put. It doesn't extend all the way to the floor, which leaves plenty of room underneath for a miter saw, for example. Excellent thinking ahead, December me! Moving our eyes slightly down and to the right, I'm leaving as much space as possible for ✨French cleats ✨ ("Haaklatten" in Dutch) for tool storage. It's all the rage on the YouTubes because it's easy to build, extremely modular, and just makes for good #content. I will have a traditional shelf above that for anything that won't fit easily on the cleat wall.
But the most important tool in the toolshed is the workbench. Experts agree that the best height for a workbench is "It depends." I'm a tall guy, and I want to make mine 92 cm (3 feet 1⁄4 inch) tall so that the freezer fits juuuust underneath a 6 cm flat working area. Doing this leaves enough room in the shed for a miter saw. The freezer is on the left of the workbench so that I can have a bench clamp for right-handed cuts (I'm ambidextrous, though.)
I'm planning for electricity to come down the middle of the wall, with two wall sockets for battery chargers. This then splits at the bottom to power the miter saw and the freezer on the left, and the table saw on the right. I don't know how much power this would draw or whether this is even a good idea, and I plan to ask an expert before I do anything stupid.
All in all, I'm very happy with how this plan turned out! The workbench is the first thing I plan to build, and it's also my greatest woodworking challenge yet. I will need to sketch it out in SketchUp or similar before I buy any wood. I'll let you know how it goes!