How High is My Cutting Table? And How Big is TOO Big?

Now that I've bored you all with my dry-as-dust discussion of ergonomic sewing table heights (click here if you missed that one and can't bear to go on without it), we're moving on to the second-most-important work station in a sewing studio: The Cutting Table.  Dum, dum dum dum.....

New Cutting Table In-Progress

This is my fourth custom-built cutting table, believe it or not.  It consists of a kitchen drawer base cabinet that I bought and painted red for the sewing room in our last house, along with two ClosetMaid modified wire drawer units on either side.  I saw these wire mesh drawer bins in Carolyn Woods' book, Organizing Solutions for Every Quilter, which I reviewed here yesterday.  These are the bins that Alex Anderson uses to organize her own fabric stash, and I bought two of the 40" tall, 17" wide 5 Drawer Kit units from Home Depot online and then had Bernie cut them down for me. 

The surface of my cutting table, for now, is an old 67" x 35 1/2" Pottery Barn kitchen table top that was previously repurposed as a kiddie arts and crafts table in our play room. Honestly, I'm torn about the cutting table size, which is why I want to try this setup out for awhile and see if I can live with it.  My former cutting table (below) was a whopping 54" x 72".  That table was sized large enough to accommodate 54" wide bolts of drapery fabric and was a nice size for quilt basting, but it ate up a lot of space in the room since it was positioned as an island, accessible from all four sides.


Previous Cutting Table, 54" x 72", 35 1/2" height

The old cutting table was impossibly heavy and was balanced on four little wooden book cases with dead space at the corners and beneath the center of the table where all sorts of stuff would get piled and forgotten.   I rarely ever sew any drapery stuff anymore, but I liked knowing that I could if I wanted to.  I also liked having a table roomy enough that I could be rotary cutting on one end and sorting/staging my project on the other side of the table. 

However, one of my major goals from this rework/remodel is to free up enough space for a small seating area.  It's nice having a Room of One's Own, but who wants to quilt in solitary confinement, after all?  So we're testing out a much smaller (and much more NORMAL) sized cutting table, and I've positioned it up against the wall beneath the window to free up even more space.  If I decide I can live with this size, then Bernie will morph this into something sturdier with additional storage space, perhaps on casters with a drop-down leaf in the back so I can pull it out and get additional workspace every once in a blue moon when I need that larger size.

OSHA Cutting Table Dude

The height of my new work-in-progress cutting table is currently 37 5/8".  Of course my attempt to find a consensus about the "ergonomically correct" cutting table was a big flop -- recommendations ranged anywhere from 34" to 40" for me.  Everyone says to stand and bend your arms at about a 90 degree angle, and have someone measure from your elbow to the floor.  One book said that my cutting table should come up to the bottom of my elbow, but most sources, including the U.S. Department of Labor's OSHA guidelines, said that the table should be at elbow height or just a few inches below that, and a couple sources suggested slightly different ideal heights for cutting tables depending on whether you'll be cutting with shears or with a rotary cutter (elbow height if you cut primarily with scissors or shears, and a few inches below that if you primarily use rotary cutting tools).

I knew the table had to go a little higher than the 35 1/2" I had before, because I had that lovely red base kitchen drawer cabinet that I wanted to use and it didn't fit beneath my old table.  So I decided to go up about 2" to a 38" table height -- remember that I'm 5'8" tall, my elbow height is 40" from the floor, and your mileage may vary!  The idea is that I will be able to cut longer and more comfortably (sans back pain) if I don't have to bend down and stoop constantly at the cutting table.