Thanks for the responses so far.
Let's see- I'm in a suburban area. I have three step-daughters and that aforementioned wood shop with a huge backlog of projects, so it's hard to say how often it will get used. I'm hoping to set aside a couple of 1-2 hour blocks of time per week.
As for the type of projects I am planning, I am not entirely sure. I want to start out by focusing on skill building. I was planning on finding a small project like a key chain or bottle opener and making a ton of them just to get practice time in. I love the idea of forging hardware for furniture projects, so I may move on to that after I have some skills under my belt. I also have a Gransfors Bruks ax that I love. I can definitely see myself getting into axes and hatchets at some point.
I was mainly considering the fire brick forge due to its simplicity to build. I don't have any dreams of it lasting very long. It's just quick to build and cheap. This is important for several reasons including price, limited shop time and no actual blacksmithing experience. I don't want to spend too much time or money building something that turns out not to be well suited for what I end up forging, so an inexpensive starter seems like a good way to get my practice time in while learning what I like and don't like. I did spend some time looking at a few really affordable small forges from Devil Forge. I may decide to get a small cheap forge like that for around $200 instead of trying to build my first one. Any thoughts on that strategy?