Vertically Challenged

This week at work has been crazy busy, but I'm finally getting a chance to look at things again. Now that I've got my layout from the birds eye view the way I like it (thanks for the comments, ladies!), I'm trying to think 3d.

I've heard for years about having one's knees and hips at right angles, but I can never get that to work for me at the office. I feel like a kid at the dinner table, so I end up needing a footrest, or simply sitting cross-legged in a chair.

BUT, since I'm making my own table, I got to let the chair go down until I was at the right height. I feel bad for anyone much shorter, because I took the chair as low as it could go before I got it to the right height.

Then I used my ironing board as a way to figure out the height of the table. When I put my machine on the board and get it to the height where my arms are perpendicular, the table was only 23" off the floor. But, my machine bed is rather high (4.75") and my other machines are a little closer to 3.5" to 4." So, I tried pushing the table up to 25.5." That still felt much better than my current set up, and at least the table isn't below 2' tall :)

Here's a pic dh took of my sewing table height:


The pressing center is supposed to be 3-4" below your mid-elbow (thus bending your elbow at a 90 degree angle when pushing an iron). This felt really odd to me, so I lowered it a bit to be 6" below mid-elbow (34" for me). Here's a pic:



You can see that my elbow is at maybe a 100 degree angle. That felt good to me for both ironing, cutting with scissors and rotary cutters. So, both my pressing and cutting tables will be at this height.

While I was fiddling around, I also placed the ironing board at a depth that would match the depth of the cutting table. And I moved my current cutting table to where the pressing table would be. This gave me a good feel for the layout of the room. I had good clearance everywhere I wanted it, and the space inthe middle felt really spacious. Huzzah!