Scene Shop Clean-Up Project -- SUCCESS!

[Molinero]

As those of you who work in educational theatre (especially at the secondary level) are acutely aware, keeping a scene shop clean, organized, and safe can be exceedingly difficult. I just finished my second year as TD at my current school, where I inherited a scene shop that had been relegated mostly to storage. When I first arrived, there was literally NO workspace in the room, the paint area dominated the available floor space, and the rest was filled with scrap wood, flats, platforms, a tablesaw, and -- of course -- costumes. My first three weeks at the school involved filling the dumpster five times, and that was just to create enough space to work in the shop at all.

Toward the end of my second year, I hatched the idea to re-design the shop. It's L-shaped, and the tool cage was located in the crook of the L -- a layout which, coupled with the aforementioned configuration of our paint area, made terrible use of the shop's floor space. So, this summer, I recruited student volunteers and we emptied the shop onto the stage, cleaned, reconfigured our wall-mounted lumber rack, moved the tool cage to the back corner (and moved the paint area to the crook of the L), and filled three Bagsters and two dumpsters with junk, old scenery, unusable building materials (like several sheets of donated countertop laminate), and more junk. Here are the results.

Still to add: rolling work tables and a secondary wall-mounted lumber rack.

Thoughts?

M

[jglodeklights]

Looking good. A well laid out shop makes construction much much easier and efficient!

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[josh88]

That was what I spent all last week doing as well. First real down time after a year in my new shop. It was time for more shelving, a new paint area and some more storage in general. A whole lot better than it was.