My shop

Allen Bryant

Member
Messages
35
Location
Bumpass, VA
This project has been several years in the making, and is finally coming together. At our old house we lived on a part of a farm, and I had access to a 18x24 barn for my wood working. This size actually worked out pretty good. I was able to get all my tools in there comfortably with some planning and still have room to work on some decent sized projects. After moving to our current location, I tried to fit the tools and setup into what was the third bay of the garage. The thinking here was that I could move one of the cars out if I needed room temporarily. In practice, this did not work as well for me as I would have liked. I had purchased tools over the years that needed room just to sit them and one thing that got neglected was where I would put projects in progress when it was time for the cars to come back in. The final issue presented itself last spring when my mom had to come stay with us for a few weeks. She's getting up in age and has gotten to the point where she will, but doesn't like to climb the stairs to the second floor. We have a guest bedroom/office on the first floor, but we only have a 1/2 bath down there. There is a real possibility that she may eventually move in with us and if that happens we really need a full bathroom on the first floor. Being off the garage it would come in handy as well for both us and the kids if we are too dirty to go through the house to the other bathrooms. After working with the architect that did the original design of the house the only way we could come up with to renovate the existing laundry room and bathroom, was to extend 6 feet into the garage, dropping my usable space down to 10x14. With that happening, I had to look at alternates, so we decided on a 20x32 ,640 square foot structure in the back yard. The land had been cleared for some time, so we were ready to start construction.

I knew that I wanted a wooden floor and we had to look at costs as well, so I ended up going with a modified pole barn. Instead of the poles running all the way up to the roof, we stopped those about 18 inches off the ground and put a platform on top of it. In April of 2014 I had a friend bring his tractor over with a post hole digger and we dug 12, 12 inch wide by 4 foot deep holes. This is way overkill for the area but the will not move for the most part unless we get hit with another earthquake and even then they may move with the ground preventing some damage.


The first set of pictures is from the foundation, to the final floor in place. In addition I extended the driveway down the property to beside the shop. I needed a better place to park our camper as well and this gave me the ability to put in an outlet for it, so I didn't have to run adapters and extension cords out when I needed to power up the camper.

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We had about a 2 month wait before I was able to return back to work on it. But one Friday morning, the trucks started rolling in with building materials. When I went to the lumber yard, I put in an order for just about everything I could think of that I would need to start construction and it all came at once on 3 different trucks. Some of it was stacked out near the shop and the stuff that would be used later was stored in the garage.

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Next up was framing. I hired this part out to the guys that originally framed our house. I thought he was going to bring his whole crew, but he did almost the whole thing himself including setting the trusses. The only help he brought in was to lay the plywood and roofing felt.

After that I took back over and built the front ramp and put up the siding and shingles. The ramp is made from leftover Trex decking from where I put the deck on the house a few years ago. This will help match the rest of the property. I was unable to find the exact color siding, it had been discontinued, so if you look close you can tell it's slightly off, but it's not butting up to the house, so it will do.

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Off to work on the interior. I did the electrical, insulation, walls, paint and floor, but contracted out the drywall on the ceiling. During this time I had the heat pump installed. I went with a 1.5 ton split unit. Should have plenty of heating and cooling for the shop.

I went with OSB on the walls. It turned out pretty nice after it was painted, but boy did it suck up the paint. The 5 gallons I bought for the first coat of primer just did give me one coat over the whole thing, but with the paint done it looks good. For the floor, I went with a textured wood laminate. It looks like hardwood, but has a raised grain on it to give me some grip in case the saw dust gets slippery. It went down in a day and looks good. It's also water resistant and according to the box can actually be hosed down if need be.

I have a total of 13 outlets in the walls, about every 4 feet or so along all four walls and 2 pull down cord reels from the ceilings. All are indepenent circuits, one for each wall and one for the ceiling. The lights are on two separate circuits as well.

In the back right corner is a closet that will eventually house the dust collector and next to it, is a built in storage rack for plywood in both full and partial sheets.

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Over the past week, I was able to get out there quite a bit. I finished installing the lights. 12 total each with 4 bulbs each. There is a lot of light in this shop.

Finished up installing the rest of the electrical outlets and will some help from the neighbors we moved the big equipment out of the garage and hung the air cleaner in it's location.

Now comes the fun part of cleaning, assembling and setting up the tools. The back wall is going to be one long wall of cabinets with the Miter saw and radial arm saw built into them. My old table saw had the router table built into one of the wings. Now that I have some more room, I think I'm going to come up with a better router table that is separate from the table saw.

This will be it for a while. It will probably be another couple of weeks before I'm back out there. The next updates will come once I get all the equipment setup and start building the cabinets.

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Looking great, Allen! Looks like you planned it very well, too, what with the wood walls, plenty of outlets, etc.

I'll bet you rearrange the tool layout at least six or seven times within the next year, though. I know I did that in my shop. Even after ten years, I still rearrange things - although less extensively - at least a couple times a year.
 
Nice shop you've got there Allen. Size wise I think that is about the area I really use of mine, been considering partitioning it off to get it sealed up and use the rest for storage (not that it isn't already). I'd be curious how the flooring works out over time. I've got some laminate down in my office and it does get slick when I track in dust, so I try to keep it cleaned up.
 
I'll bet you rearrange the tool layout at least six or seven times within the next year, though.

I probably will, which is why for now, I'm going to roll the dust collector around till I have a good idea of where I can leave stuff. Don't want to spend all the time and energy setting up duct work, till I know the plan in my head for tool placement will actually work in practice.
 
That's a fantastic looking shop, Allen. I think you saved a bundle doing so much work yourself. I would love to see a video of someone framing and setting the trusses by themselves on something like this. It's gotta take some special techniques.
 
That's a fantastic looking shop, Allen. I think you saved a bundle doing so much work yourself. I would love to see a video of someone framing and setting the trusses by themselves on something like this. It's gotta take some special techniques.

I watched him set the first few. What he did was setup a long walkboard the length of the shop in the middle. He then attached some 2x4's on the end wall and used that to hold the trusses up side down from the ground. From there he climbed up with a rope rotated the trusses on the 2x4's nailed to the side of the shop. The trusses were not that heavy and he was able to slide them down the walls. He then had this metal contraption that looked like a giant folding ruler. When you unfolded a section it had pins that bit into the ride of the 2x of the truss as the hinge points. This automatically set the spacing for the top of the truss as well as held them upright. After that he just nudged the bottoms into place and nailed them in.

lookun great allen but why the double stick framing on the back wall?

Larry, those are the uprights for what will be the lumber storage rack. Stole that idea from the WoodWhisperer site. I mainly just put them up to get them out of the way. I'll work on the rack later.
 
Looks like a nice open shop and a very nice site for it as well.

Interesting details on the guy doing the framing. Always interesting to watch someone who knows what they're doing like that make it happen.

The OSB came out smoother/nicer looking than I'd have anticipated. I wonder with the paint cost if 3/8 or 1/2 ply would have been close to break even..
 
The price difference in 4x9 OSB versus 4x9 1/2 plywood was pretty steep. I used a 5 gallon can for the primer and about 4 gallons of the paint to put 2 coats of that up. I'm thinking the paint cost would have been the same for either.
 
... He then had this metal contraption that looked like a giant folding ruler. When you unfolded a section it had pins that bit into the ride of the 2x of the truss as the hinge points. This automatically set the spacing for the top of the truss as well as held them upright. After that he just nudged the bottoms into place and nailed them in....

Must be something like this:
http://www.truslock.com/step2.html
 
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