PN-001-006 - Quiet Here, Busy There

Journal Entry

It’s been a little quiet here lately.

The reason is pretty simple: I’ve been building.

On September 1st, I started what has turned into one of my largest projects yet - building an entire maker room from scratch.

And when I say from scratch, I mean it.

Rather than buying workbenches, cabinets, shelving, storage systems, or other fixtures and arranging them in a room, I decided to build everything myself.

Part of that was about creating a space specifically around how I work. I wanted to decide where things should live, how I move through the room, where tools are used, and what would make the process of going from an idea to actually making something as frictionless as possible.

But there was another reason, too.

I wanted the room itself to be a project.

That has meant a lot of plywood, measuring, cutting, painting, assembling, changing my mind, taking things apart, and building them again.

It has also meant that most of the time I would normally spend documenting projects has instead been spent working on this one.

So while the website has been quiet, the workshop definitely hasn’t been.

After a little more than two weeks of work, I’m finally on the home stretch. There are still details to finish and systems to refine, but the room is beginning to feel less like a construction project and more like the place I imagined when I started.

And once the dust settles, I’ll have quite a bit to document.

Take Away

• Sometimes documenting the work has to take a back seat to actually doing the work.

• I’ve spent the last couple of weeks building the environment where many of my future projects will happen. In a way, it feels less like I’ve been away from the site and more like I’ve been building its next chapter.

Closing Thought

Sometimes the workshop is the project.