Well, I’m still alive – barely! It has been a CRAZY Spring around here – and I’ve hardly had time to eat and sleep – let alone blog!
March 4th was the day that construction was supposed to start to finish off the new building – we actually started on March 5th. SO, February was spent trying to finish as much stuff, and sell as many projects as possible – just to clear space!
Then, once the construction started, it just sucked me in… I actually thought I would be able to stay out of it, but I should know better. My father is cabinet-maker, antique wood boat restorere, etc., and when I was a kid, he was a general contractor and home-builder. So I can do all of this myself, but it’s just too much for one guy, and I have a good friendship with my contractor, so we jumped in with his help.
Well, I’m a perfectionist I guess and a micro-manager, and this whiole thing turned out to be bigger and more expensive than I had planned, so the next thing you know, I have put down the hammer and dolly and picked up a claw hammer and, well, the rest is history…
I’m doing all of this to try and get the business out of my house and my life (but mostly out of my wife’s hair! And so moving the shop to the new building is only part of it – I need to take everything with me that I come into the house for as well. That includes: Bathroom, desk, computer, packing area – the works. And so somewhere along the way, I decided to turn the parts attic into an office and packing area – with a bathroom. And well, as you’ll see, I may have gone a little overboard…
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- Step one was to clear out the attic so we could get started. Good LUCK! I had nowhere to put this stuff – the storage warehouse that I rent space in is packed FULL, and there is a 24-foot trailer outside packed full too! So the best we could do was to push everything into the center like this.
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- Here’s a shot of the other side – the front. We need to clear this out to lay the main HVAC plenum in here and also frame out around that with a small wall.
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- This is the Monocoque Metalworks stock of “extra” center sections. There are 3 or 4 in here that have had it, but otherwise, these are restorable. I have serious issues…
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- A few days or weeks later, and things are all framed out and the HVAC is installed. No more sweltering and/or stuffy Summer days in the old shop – we now will have humidity-free comfort year-round! By the time this picture was taken, we had figured out that we needed to pretty much empty the upstairs, and it’s all downstairs – which is INSANE – just crammed full so that you can’t walk at all…
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- The 2×6 walls were packed with R-19 insulation – plus the siding has two inches of foam in it and is R-5 by itself! This should help keep the heat (and the NOISE!) inside!
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- Plumbing the bathroom. I know this seems a little extravagant for a shop, but it’s necessary – I have pretty much detroyed the downstairs bathroom in the house. The white toilet has rusted from the steel dust that shakes off my pants…
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- Here is the knee-wall in the front that closes in the HVAC plenum. The rafters were packed with R-38 insulation, and they changed the climate of the upstairs immediately!
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- Here’s another shot – we built small benches into each dormer and that turned out to be a really cool idea.
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- Heat Pump – it’s all electric, but with the ridiculus insulation in this building, I’m not worried about it…
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- Drilling the floor of the shop with a core drill for the water line.
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- Lucky for me, my storage space in the warehouse is rented to me from a concrete cutting contractor – it’s good to know the right people!
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- OK – this is where things got COMPLETELY out of control! I decided that instead of boring drywall, which I hate and is very loud, that I would do the whole interior of the shop – both floors, with 8″ tongue and groove pine that is clear-coated. This is how our Summer House was finished off when we built it about 10 years ago, and that contractor said at the time, “pine or drywall – same price – you just tell us where you want what…” I told my current contractor down here that and he said, “That guy’s crazy!” Well, now I agree!
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- The hanging of the pine just went on – and on – and on – AND ON!!! And to make matters worse, I Found a place that sold it in “Industrial grade” for MUCH cheaper (44 cents versus 1.00 a linear foot). So I figured how hard can it be to cut around a few knots? Well, for the workers I had hired to hang it – apparently, it was impossible. For me, it was kind of a challenge to make good lumber out of bad, and so this is where I jumped in and started cutting it all myself. But there was SIX THOUSAND linear feet of it out in front of the shop! The next thing you know, Brent and I are no longer working on Jags, we’re just hanging tongue and groove pine day after day – AAGGGGHHHH!!!!
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- Fast forward several weeks now – and WOW!!! I can’t really remember the pain now and I’m just excited to get moved in! Not only did we cut and nail up almost all of the pine you see here, but we clear-coated ALL of it – with TWO coats! Then we nailed down the floor – 5″ by 3/4″ thick red oak – also from the surplus building materials place, but you wouldn’t know it to look at it!
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- We still have to trim out everything, and then finish up the bathroom, but this is going to be a great space for storing the panels, taking orders, chatting with all of you on the phone, and packing up parts. Don’t worry about the weight of the parts… when we designed the building and built it 2 years ago, we were kicking around ideas for getting the shells upstairs. In the end, we gave up on that, but only after we built this floor out of 14″ laminated beams – 12″ on center. You could PARK whole cars up here!
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- We’re getting there! What you see in these photos accounts for every waking minutre of the past 7 weeks – nights, weekends, and even some cancelled work days too! I think we’re over the hump, but… and it pains me to even say this – we have to the shop downstairs next! GULP! But we’re going to take a breather for now and build some E-Type shells <--- what we're supposed to be doing here!
