jpierce

I've built quite a few guitars and pieces of small furniture using mostly hand tools and a few hand-held power tools, all on a third story porch in a small apartment in burlington vermont. It was very very tiny.

The key was getting easy to access my tools (in a closet in the apartment) so that I could quickly obtain and put away what I needed for the day. A five gallon bucket with padded bottom and one of those slip-in "toolbox" things helped immensely for getting a variety of handtools in and out without making a hundred trips. (most of the handtools lived on a series of pegboard and cubbies in the closet)

I ended up using the railings of the porch as my work surface to do most of my rough work, and a cheap fold-down workbench with a piece of MDF for more exacting things, or as a platform for the router table or small drill press. (Although I did a fair amount of drilling work indoors.)

It limited my woodwork to warm weather, (although with a pair of insulated work gloves, I could work well into the beginning of winter)

Dust collection was a shop vac hooked to things that made dust. I tried to use hand tools and edge tools over sandpaper whenever possible to cut down on flying airborne dust and noise.

The hardest part was turning around, particularly when holding a piece of lengthy lumber! Wacked my head a couple of times.

So you can always make do! I'd suggest storing tools inside, and making it as easy as possible to get them outside as needed. Perhaps this means making a rollable tool chest.

My new "shop space" is about the same, although we have a spare bedroom for some work to take place in. I'm jealously eyeing Blum Tool companies portable workbenches and thinking of building something similar.