My Workshop
For the first 30 years of my life, everything I learned about woodworking came from working with my father in his workshop. As mentioned elsewhere here, my father used funds he earned while in the US Army in Korea to build a small, but capable workshop. Like me, he had to stuff all his tools in a small space (in his case a basement room, in my case an external garage). Later, when he built a workbench for my brother and me, he had to give up some of that limited space for us.
When you look at my current shop, you'll see a lot of things that came directly from my father's.
The following photo is of the corner of my dad's workshop, with his workbench and table saw in prominence. I still have the workbench, it's underneath the pegboard in the header photo on this page.
Image 1: Workbench and Table Saw
If you look at the upper-left corner of the image, you'll see that he had a stack of hammers hanging across the top of the pegboard. When I moved in to my current shop, the first thing I built after I mounted the same pegboard to the wall was the hammer rack you see at the top of this page's header image.
In the middle-right of the image, you'll see a rack containing a bunch of baby food jars containing screws, bolts, and other weird stuff my dad wanted to keep handy. I still have every one of those jars, stored on a wooden shelf as shown in the following photo.
Image 2: Updated Jar Storage
On one wall of the shop, my dad used stacks of cigar boxes to store a whole variety of things; you can see them on the right of the following figure. Things like felt pads, equipment parts, bolts, screw, and more.
Image 3: Cigar Box Storage
I duplicated the same setup in my shop, replacing a lot of the cardboard cigar boxes with wooden ones I purchased in bulk on ebay. That was a great find, I wish I could get more.
Image 4: Updated Cigar Box Storage
On the left side of Image 2 are a bunch of Rubbermaid tubs with lids. The tubs were so old that if you touched them they'd fall apart. So, before I moved the shop to North Carolina, I replaced the tubs with really crappy pine drawers I'd built in a hurry. Now, 16 years later, I've started replacing the pine drawers with poplar ones I built with much higher quality using different construction methods. As you can see from the following image, I've replaced the top set with new ones, and now I have to build the rest of them.
Image 5: Wooden storage drawers
As you can see, he had to stuff tools, books, and other stuff into all nooks and crannies in the shop.
Image 6: The Back Corner
Tucked in a back corner (behind the house's water heater) was a lathe. That is the only tool of my father's that I never used, I sold it a few years back.
Image 7: Lathe and Band Saw