let's take your guys questions uh the first question i want to answer
i said is about an apartment dweller uh joelle brooke hi joell joelle says
what ways are there that can help at-home shops be renter friendly
this is a really important question uh she goes on to say specifically living in apartments with
hard nopes such as nailing holes in the walls the floors can't sustain any damage like spill
stains and the carpet cannot be removed or changed uh she says the only solution i can
think of is placing dry core panels on top of carpet but i'm not sure how sustainable it is
covering carpet for extended periods of time um i'm going to tackle this in a couple of different
uh trajectories but i think your last assertion is absolutely correct i think if you live in a
let us start with the whole idea about renting right so you rent an apartment let's say you're
you know you don't just pay the whatever your rent is let's say it's a thousand bucks a month uh you
don't just pay that rent you also pay a security deposit and i i gotta tell you in my experience
it is rarely simple getting your security deposit back presumably within the world
it should be that you clean your apart you take pictures of your apartment before you inhabit it
all the different stains that are on the floors and the bumps that are in the walls
and then you live there for a while and then when you move out you clean it take a
picture of the same apartment it should look roughly the same except for a little more
living and then when it is you know roughly the condition you rented it in you get your security
deposit back in my personal experience it is never simple to get your security deposit back the
landlord's always looking for stuff and frankly you know people are wear and tear on apartments so
when you add a makerspace into the mix it is really something to pay careful attention to
because one spill of some acrylic paint could cause you to have to pay for the
carpeting across your apartment uh or you know that whole room that's real
and i don't think per your last assertion joelle that you are not sure how sustainable it is to
cover carpet for extended periods of time i agree i don't think it's entirely sustainable to do that
um if you were going to cover carpet for a period of time i would cover it with something
that was absorb i would cover it with a waterproof layer and then i would put something of
probably two waterproof layers and then i would put something absorbent over that
and another waterproof layer on top of that before i'd cover it with something because the last thing
you want is to put down a surface not think about that and then that surface becomes this like
seeding ground for staining your carpet or whatever floor you have underneath hold on
my internet is also been a little spotty i know there's outages all across the country right now
all across the country or just california yeah it's big okay
let's talk about making in an apartment um when you're doing stuff like this that's pretty
sustainable not going to cause a lot of havoc but yeah when you start to use paints or sprays
you've got to be really careful in an apartment you may even think about a a work surface
that itself is bordered so that a spill would be contained within the work surface
uh in my fantasy i have at some point a tv show in which i go around and help people set up tiny
little shops in their houses like i love this idea as as a show it's a it's like not a home makeover
show it's like a mini shop building show and it's just you know i've built shops in tiny spaces and
in large spaces and they all have their different requirements and they're all they all have their
limitations and the things that are great about them um and every situation is unique everything
you want to build um you know brings with it its commensurate set of issues but i think it's
really smart for young makers or people who don't have a lot of experience in the world to realize
that the uh it's not just as simple when you rent an apartment and putting a security deposit
keeping the apartment nice and then getting it back when you're done if you are making in there
you are potentially increasing your liability significantly and a lot of landlords that i've
run into could take a situation like that and make a lot of hay out of it at your expense
uh i'm not trashing landlords as an overall group i'm just saying in my experience i've run into
some unscrupulous renters uh in the past and i've also run into some wonderful and scrupulous ones
um laura kampf has a beautiful actually the very first video i became aware of laura kampf
uh that that helped me become aware of laura kampf is a video in which she made a portable
woodworkers bench that she could use and then remove when she didn't need it uh i think the
idea of portable solutions for things like that is really really smart um i think if i were well
actually i'll give you a wonderful example of a tiny workspace and i wonder if i could
find any pictures of this so when lucas went into production on episodes one two and three star wars
he they set up a tiny little model shop up at the ranch on the third floor of the main house
which is a an office space it was never meant to be a shop space but
my friends john goodson and john duncan spent years up in that third floor office effectively
making all the prototype maquettes for all the models for episodes one two and i'm assuming
three although i was gone by then um and they like they covered all the surfaces with plastic
they put down uh they put down protective flooring to protect but they were painting my cats they
were airbrushing they had little uh air retrieval stations on there i don't know if i'm telling
too many tails out of school but it's been long enough i don't think anyone's gonna get in trouble
um but yeah they had little like evacuation fans so they could airbrush the models but not you know
get it airborne out in the out in the space it was a wonderful it was like the ultimate apartment
model shop because this space was never meant to have that kind of industry in it i spent a few
weeks up there i made one of the i think i made the first uh mark siegel and i made the first foam
core mock-up of the arena from episode episode two is the arena right the big arena battle yeah um
joelle i could talk about this for a long time and i recognize i haven't come to any specific
conclusions but i i because i don't have any every situation is unique it's more about having a frame
of mind for thinking through those solutions um but you really like if you're working with wet
stuff whether it's chemicals or specifically paints you've got to be incredibly incredibly
careful in a space that's not yours that you don't own because like i said one bottle of lacquer
could cost you thousands of dollars if it spills in the wrong place that is a great question and
frankly um this video goes to air on youtube later and you're watching it and you have some solutions
i would love to see your uh your suggestions in the comments um this is it's a group effort
uh so we got some questions live during my build uh somebody says um
matt wants to know shop lighting question is there a good practice for spacing out shop lights across
a ceiling um no except more is better um i as i said in the beginning of this live stream
i'm toying around with the idea of expanding my shop space within the space that i inhabit here
and one of the key things that i would that i would tackle in that case is the lighting
because uh when i built these guys when i built these it was when i discovered that i had not
been working with enough light my whole life um and having a bright light source to work with is
it's for me it was cr i was shocked at how much i had overlooked that specific bit of infrastructure
so if i was moving in here today from from from scratch one of the key things i would do is i'd
probably build a a long rectangular truss and i'd hang a whole bunch of led light fixtures from it
i'd get a bathe wash of light across the whole shop that would probably be you know another
full f-stop brighter than it is now in addition to having lights at each of the tool stations
uh including uh overhead light at each station and small detail lights the small detail light i
have on my bandsaw it gets a tremendous amount of use as do the ones on my drill press and my mill
the rule of thumb that i would say is more is better it is a great time to want to light your
shot because these like 48 inch fixtures are like 20 bucks 25 bucks at the hardware store
these are 48 inch led fixtures now i just had my first led fixture fail on me which
is really annoying because the bulbs are rated till whatever 100 000 hours but the electronics
don't last a fraction of that uh so i'm you know i might do your
research just to make sure you're finding the durable brands that
that will last you but i don't think you can go too far overboard now you can load up your ceiling
with led lights it's not going to get too warm it's just about making sure that you can see and
like i said it is an often overlooked even by me uh part of shop infrastructure great question matt