I think there is like a single orientation that will let you place a bench down in the longhouse, but you're honestly much better off with a different building. I definitely wouldn't recommend longhouses, Y houses, or bughouses. Longhouses are really hard to cram most things into, it can be done, but it's extremely cramped. The Y house looks good, but is buggy as all hell, whenever I build a research station I invariably end up unable to use the entire left wing of the structure, and building on the roof is very irritating. The bughouse has lots of room, but is actually infuriatingly hard to pack stations into.
From my experience the L house is without question the best value for stations, you can cram whole industries into just one of them, and the Hub has two of them in ruined condition. One of my best setups was just rebuilding the city there, had a blast, but dear hell it was hard to source building materials.
As for outpost building without research, if you've built up a core of about 5 combatants in the thirties, and have about six people to do non-combat jobs you can build in pretty reasonable safety most places. Just steer clear of the foglands, cannibal plains, and any place with high concentrations of beak things. BDN will be a serious threat until you have tier two walls and crossbows (dedicated gunners needed, at least 4, preferably six) in a proper killbox configuration with an airlocked gate setup, at that point you're pretty much secure against lower level threats.