I wonder if anyone knows of any resources for people who want to maximize the woodworking they can do in an average-sized city apartment. We don't have the space to for a real woodshop. But what we can do is dedicate a sizable closet to tools, try to get as far as we can without the big stuff, and live with woodworking involving a significant "set up a temporary shop in the middle of the living room" and then tear it down phase. I've been doing this for small projects, improvising and making do, and would love to hear stories of how others have managed.
The standard advice for this if you want to woodwork as a hobby (not for utility, that is): learn to use handtools. Paul Sellers is a good youtuber for this (and there are many others). The r/woodworking subreddit is also quite active and has good starting resources. Dust control for power tools is much harder, so if you're limited to working in your living space, it can be a problem.
I'll add to this: unless you have a lot of money, hand tools are going to not only be the quiet option, but the best option overall.
I recently bought a Craftsman bench jointer, and tried to flatten some walnut for furniture making with it. I went over and over the jointer with it, and it still wasn't flat. I tried various techniques found on YouTube, read until my eyes crossed, and still couldn't get the walnut flattened. Granted, maybe my particular jointer is bad, but I had limited walnut stock and didn't want to continue grating on the pieces I needed until they were too thin and unusable.
So, I threw my hands in the air and just went at it with a hand plane. It was a bit of work to get the pieces flat and square, but planing is kind of enjoyable. You're also not creating a ton of sawdust - just nice, silky shavings. On top of that, the surface of the wood looks great when hand planed vs. sanded or machined in other ways.
Also, if you are using an electric saw in your apartment in the middle of the city at any time of day, you are probably a bad neighbor.
I think a lot of the question is going to be, is your goal to work with wood and make things in general, or do you have specific sorts of things you want to make?
There is really no limit to what you can make by skillfully assembling small pieces of wood into large panels, but it's a lot easier to make inlaid wood boxes in an apartment than bookshelves and desks.
A lot of the woodworking you see is furniture making, which typically involves a lot of dimensional lumber and large wood panels which are easiest worked with table saws, planers, joiners and routers, and a large shop and lots of machinery is a boon.
But inlay, woodcarving and even scrollsaw work can be done with smaller pieces of wood and little or no power tools.
I use power tools only during working hours and try to never go over a cumulative hour of use per day. In Berlin at least I think it's fine, this city has a DIY-ish culture, lots of apartments have homemade furniture, and the sound of electric tools is a common one.
You know your neighborhood and neighbors and apartment construction better than I do, but the caution is always that not everyone keeps the same working hours -- night shift sleeps during the day, small children and infants nap throughout the day, etc.
Just do it. I bought a table saw to make a living room table for my rental apartment. It was a Sears 2 HP one, where you could take the legs off, so I often used it right on the floor.
These days they have much better "job site" table saws that are fold-up portable.
If you are in a city, there are probably several rent-a-shops in your area that function much like co-working spaces - basically a wood-focused makerspace. A friend of mine used one:
- you go in and pay for some hands on time with the shop master to learn the rules and prove you can use the tools safely.
- Once you're vetted, you can rent non-master shop-time at a much lower hourly rate.
- If you encounter a problem, can rent an hour of master time to get advice and help.
- They had spaces where you could leave items being glued, etc. Store your in-progress work with a sign that has your contact info - they'll reach out if you leave it there too long.
I helped my friend with the glue up as he built a pair of end tables. Was a pretty cool space.
Discoverability is a bit tough, but seems it could be ideal for your use case.
