Umbrella Corp Themed Workshop?

[UmbrellaTech]

Hello everyone - this will be a bit of a unique one I think! It'll be a long slow-burn of a project for a while but now I'm looking to buy a house and workshop of my own soon enough. At almost 40 I have at last got the chance.

One of my passions is cars and I maintain/modify my own vehicles. I intend to build a 2-car garage and (getting to the point now) I'd like VERY much to make it "Umbrella themed" - as in, if the old-school Umbrella Corp had a garage/car workshop, what would it look like?

Currently I've got a temporary space - all tool drawers are black (bought or painted) and some I've put Umbrella corp metal eBay badges onto. I'd assume though in a 'real' old-school Umbrella workshop there's be a lot more silver or white, probably white ceilings and floors and lots of strip lighting. Also old-style CRT monitors for any CNC machines (although there ARE flatscreens in Birkin's lab in RE 2.)

Just want to open this up to the floor and happily take any suggestions etc. Help me build my dream nerd garage? This'll be a long project of probably 18 months plus but we'll see how progress starts to look.

Pitch in anything you might want - vibe though is the old-school Umbrella from the original 3 games. End of 2021 we should have something!

Thanks for reading everybody.

 

[UmbrellaTech]

Have my eye on a place with, if I'm honest, an OBSCENELY large workshop/garage setup. Without getting too far ahead of myself (this is honestly going to be the better part of two years) I do also want to get a little bit excited about it. So, thoughts on what it'd potentially be like, if Umbrella Corp actually had a garage workshop somewhere:

- Bare concrete walls, or brilliant white. Either way very very well lit.
- No wood.
- Tidy and clean ofc.
- Tool cabinets and gear predominantly black, white and/or bare metal. Some red ok.
- Many Umbrella logos.
- XD-R G.1 in massive letters on a wall.
- A key shaped like the OG RE1 armor key to unlock the door because why not? (I can machine this.)
- A shotgun ammo crate or two around the place for supplementary storage.

Some mix between the "industrial" vibe and the "lab" vibe. Honestly the place I'm looking at has thee separate little workshops (think two one-car garages worth) and a four-car main garage so I have options of another room for the CNC machines and lathes etc off the main one. Garage itself can be more "lab" (and brighter as I'll be in there more) and the adjoining workshop for the computer controlled CAM gear etc can be more "industrial". The rest of the house will be a normal house because (contrary to the picture I've painted so far in this thread) I'm not an Umbrella fetishist but this is the idea I'm totally looking forward to.

What's mental irritating is that there's no real "storage" that's uniform between the labs in the original PS1 RE1 and RE2. A few generic desks, shelves, lockers and crates and that's predominantly it. In the tyrant room in RE1 there is a uniformity in the design for the computer cabinets, for example, with an angular sloping to the front top that I'm not above just making trolleys to resemble from steel I could weld up and paint but that's about all. Illuminated glass cabinets abound, but only so much use in a workshop. The flip side of all that is there's nothing to directly emulate, so every chance to get a little creative. Also there currently is no Umbrella Corp car tuning shop so it pretty much couldn't be "wrong" exactly...

Any and all musings, thoughts, telling me how insane I am totally welcome. Will continue plotting over the coming months or years!

 

[UmbrellaTech]

Okay, so it looks like a house is coming up! I'll need to have the existing workshop extended and rebuilt. Looking like finished interior dimensions will be 6x6m (around 19.5ft) so not enormous, but big enough to get into plenty of projects/trouble.

Started pondering it. Moody though the gray concrete look of the original PS1 Umbrella Corp facility is, I think it'd be more conducive to work to make the place "lab style" and bright, rather than a dingy concrete cave. The "vibe" still though to be fairly faithful to the original, 90s RE1 and 2 labs.

So, pondering white epoxy floors and very light grey walls, probably white ceiling too with strip lights. White floors yes will get dirty enough pretty fast however I can promise dropping a nut/bolt/tool onto a non-white floor means it effectively gains stealth camo while you rummage for it. Cleaning a white floor once a year isn't a huge deal, can live with it not perfect. Tool cabs to be mainly bare metal if possible, or light grey/white and maybe black accents on things.

Onto the insanity-level window shopping then! Let's start then madness with toolboxes. Take my hand and on we go...

Firstly, I am not COMPLETELY above welding up my own cabinets from sheet steel/box section/angle iron. For ratchets, spanners and "sort of non power tools" (I'm already kinda set in my ways in current workshop) It'll likely be two larger roller cabs. So, looking at the games the Umbrella Corp were not big on storage outside of cardboard boxes and crates. If they'd had a top-end motor vehicle maintenance garage I should imagine they'd have done tool storage in the same way they'd have done racking; either buy it in or manufacture it.

In the power room (and also Tyrant room) of the Arklay lab there's these cabs:

I will make an assumption on these being regular 19" racks because, if they weren't, it'd mean Umbrella Corp had their own spec for rackmount equipment. It's just more likely to assume (though probably worth reminding everyone I do know Resident Evil is pretend and not a documentary) they bought in some gear where available and didn't literally manufacture every single little thing. So, remaining "authentic" can be buying in "stuff that looks like it."

Fair to assume they'd go to their same supplier for similar gear, and so in keeping with that truncated front corner design we get Draper/SGS toolboxes looking more or less in the ballpark:

Could easily strip these or paint them silver.

I'd also think very very limited wood, if any. So full on 1/2" steel workbench top, with perhaps big old vice in it for "main" workbench. Think similar to this, though I'll definitely be making this myself to fit the space:

Shelves galvanised metal or again white, black or grey.

There's also some merit in having a single wall look like the following. Although more than a single wall I know for sure will be limiting; far better to not act like there's infinite space and with things like foldable cranes, storage for wheels and shelving etc does make this approach actually rather restrictive to go too far with wallmount cabinets etc, though the vibe of these spaces is rather lovely:

Shelving where I need it can be eBay cheapie shelving, or if I can get hold of some used Dexion-type so much the better.

Dexion:

eBay:

Wood though... yuck.

I must admit, I do find the laboratory facilities of the Umbrella Corp in 1 and 2 kinda spartan for what they're doing there; lots of heavy industrial plant gear and barely a test tube to show for it. Having said that, I also don't know personally how you knock together a killer zombie death-virus, but I will be assuming now they had the bare minimum, and it did them well to try and keep their covert lab a massive, non-obvious secret.

They were however VERY much into their Umbrella Corp logos, so this will go on the ceiling:

Nice extras would be a shotgun ammo crate or two for storing some things, see if I can get a Taxago oil can vinyl sticker made too for a shelf:

Quiet afternoon at work so having a scribble here. Please throw any thoughts or anything, tell me this is nuts/not nuts enough, tell me what'd be in YOUR Umbrella Corp garage, daydream along etc...

For completeness, the first big project will be making a monstrously powerful version of the following, which will be two-tone black and white with blue dials:

 

[UmbrellaTech]

Few bits from the current space. Nothing going on the house or the workshop yet, just a couple of pics from where I operate now: