01 Aug 2020

Please note: This was my last shop at my last house. I am currently in a one-bedroom apartment while I complete this Sofware Developer journey that I am on. Hopefully someday soon I will be able to recreate the magic of this place. But I plan to do a few things differently when that happens.

So it had a lot of shit in it.

But how did I go from high-speed young Army lieutenant and adventure sports enthusiast, to a guy that liked to spend all of his free time tinkering away in a one car garage?

It happened while on deployment.

My first and only deployment was just to Europe. It was more like I took the day job I had here and transplanted it across the pond to tight living conditions and no wife. Since I was away from my life and living out of bags, I really only had what I brought with me and the associations of my soldiers and fellow officers. Over the course of the deployment the bright eyed and bushy tailed young officer I used to be slowly disintegrated. It may have something to do with the fact that I had limited distractions that American life brings about, I was working constantly, and I was not able to do the things I usually did in my free time or for relaxing.

When you spend that much time away from all that is familiar (I was definitely not deprived- the food was not good but I did do some travelling) you start to identify things you miss. Loved ones are obvious, certain foods as well. If you did not know because it’s hard to tell looking at a map, but Europe is actually a lot farther North than here. The second half of the depoloyment I was in Germany, and I used to get up at 5:00AM to the sun being fully up to go for my morning run. At one point I was in a country that was even farther north in the winter, and the sun was up from 10:00AM to 3:30PM. Sunlight shapes cultures. Strange place. So you even miss “normal” daytimes, weather, and definitely your old patterns of life.

I thought what i would miss would be the things I had cultivated over the previous few years. My gravel bicycle, time to run, mountain climbing. What happened surprised even me. After my wife, the next thing I missed was the ability to create and work with my hands. Not often but every now and then I would find myself trying to do something myself, or get intensely almost obsessively curious about how something worked. When I was a lot younger I was very into all of that, and sort of dropped it in High School because none of it was cool. What I realized was I had completely derailed the course of my life away from the things that actually made me who I am. It was on that deployment that I realized I should endeavor to become an engineer. At the time I did not know what kind of engineering I wanted to do, and I had 1.5 years left before I could leave the Army, so I decided to build the workbench with the red pegboard and start taking things apart, fixing things, and making everthing I could on my own. The garage grew and grew as I demanded more functionality from the space. New tools needed new storage. Following Adam Savage’s maxim of “Drawers are where things go to die” I opted for the most open setup possible. Poor ventialtion necessitated some dust collection efforts. Lack of horizontal surface space necessitated building a movable bench. In this time I restored old bicycles and tools, made a Raspberry Pi computer, fixed old computers, made my own cutting boards and tables, did all of my own auto maintenance, made my own Google Cardboard from scratch etc. I learned a lot about design, implementation, and iteration. During this period I knew I would eventually need to learn to code so I could understand the computer domain. When I got to that point in 2019, I did not realize the pure creation space that is the computer domain. The more I learned about how computers worked and how to program them, the more I realized that Software was the type of engineering I wanted to be involved in.

When I get the chance to rebuild this space, I believe I will opt to split it. See, the issue with this shop was I did electronics work in the same space I was doing wood and metal working. These things are unfortunately mutually exclusive. I plan to have a study that will have my electronics, computers, and 3D printing materials, and keep wood, metalwork, and associated tasks to a new garage type space. We will see what the future holds.