Fly Tying Room Renovation

The fly tying desk gets a facelift

I usually go through some sort of fly box or fly tying area re-arrangement once every year or two -- especially during the dead of winter when I'm spending more time at the vise. And for the past probably three years, I've been using a fairly large flat oak dining table as my main base of operations in the tying man-cave. As Cheech and I spend a good amount of time in the man-cave plotting out trips, talking flies and materials or doing our filming, I've realized that room is much too small for such a huge piece of furniture. So I decided to retool the room, making it more Sasquatch friendly.

Before we get too far, I've written about some of my organization tips here and here. I'm sticking to the same ideas there as far as storage goes, but I've realized I needed to consolidate and change up my tying area and make it even more efficient. I'm mostly talking about getting away from my Dwight Schrute style "megadesk" to something more user-friendly.

For me, the biggest thing when it comes to my tying desk (besides my light snobbery) is making sure I can easily reach as many materials as I can without taking my butt out of my nice comfy chair. If I have to stand up or even worse, take a few steps, I'm losing out on precious fly tying time and physically taxing my body way too much. But seriously, it really is nice to have most of the materials at my fingertips without having to dig through boxes or pull stuff off of peg boards and stuff like that.

So to begin, here's a shot of my previous setup:

Fly tying room before the renovation

You'll see the big table there in the corner. It took up too much space and in order to reach the things on the top shelf and towards the back of the table, I had to stand up and move things around. Not the most efficient setup.

Here's the "after" setup:

Renovated fly tying area

I ended up taking the table out and replacing it with a cheap ($20 total) corner unit from IKEA. I got it in the clearance area, so it was super-cheap. This freed up a lot of space and allowed me to form more of a "cockpit" tying area where most of my materials and tools are in arms' reach.

Here's a video to walk you through it all...