My work shop is a third bay of my garage. Whoever originally built the house opted not to build the area into an interior study, so that was a huge selling point when the wife and I first took a look at this house (and the kitchen spoke to her as well as the garage did to me).
During our first few years here, I built a couple of stand-alone and mobile (meaning, not secured to anything) work benches, but I kept looking at all the space available. In 2007, I finally built out my permanent work bench, an L-shaped structure with more than 9' on one leg, and more than 6' on the other, with storage beneath and shelving above. I used half-inch MDF for the top work surface. Over the years, that surface has taken a beating but it held up well.
Typically I will cover my main work space with taped-down newspaper, replacing it 2-3 times during the year. This last year, I left the same paper down all year. When I finally ripped it away after completing my two Corsairs, I noticed a lot of liquid damage to the MDF. There were spots where the MDF had welted, not sure if that is the right word, but in effect, my formerly smooth work surface now had a bunch of decidedly not smooth areas. This was probably something that built up over time, with spills (paint, glue, thinner, even a Coke or two) just eventually getting into the underlying MDF material and causing this damage.
I wanted to maintain that smooth surface, so I decided to get a new piece of MDF to replace. Given my employment status, though, I was thinking spending that money was not in my family's best interest. Then an idea occurred to me: just flip it over. The underside is still perfectly smooth, so that saved me a lot of effort at the table saw. I also took advantage of this effort to make some upgrades. The shorter leg of the L did not extend far enough past the underlying structure to allow for clamping as the longer half did, and I never took into account wires for things like lights or my TV. Always had to run those way out of the way to get to the plug that I installed underneath the longer leg of the L. So I cut wire channels into the underlying structure on the longer leg, but for the shorter leg I mounted the surface an inch away from the wall, which kills two birds with one stone - clamping area and an area to store wires.
