Between 705 & 1200 SQ/FT From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Hello everyone. My name's Tom, and I've been lurking on this forum since a Gregor Halenda (sakurama here) ADVRider thread led me to his garage/house remodel here in 2013 or so, but I haven't posted until recently, mostly because I just didn't think I'd have that much to offer. But I've learned soooo much from this forum over the years since that I figured it was time to show you all what you've taught me.

My wife and I bought our first house in May of 2008 (yes, we're idiots, we know...). I insisted on one criteria: It must either have a functional shop or land on which to build one later. We found just such a place, with the caveat being that, at the peak of the 2008 bubble, a house with land on which to build a shop was either going to be too expensive or ten million years old. Ours is the latter, and we've found since that the movie The Money Pit was a documentary.

Due to constant house repairs and renovations, I never got around to building the dream garage as I had planned. In the meantime, the house came with a 19x20 detached garage with a lean-to attached to the back. 1925 vintage, unheated, dimly lit, rotting in places. It was more shed than shop, but I made the most of it. I couldn't fit a car completely inside for work, but I mostly wrench on bikes anyway, so no big deal.

Anyway, the story of my garage build starts in May of 2015, when, while sleeping off a night shift, I wake up to my phone on the night stand ringing, missing the call, then listening to a distressed sounding voicemail from my wife. I put on some pants, walk out into the living room, and look out the window just in time for an explosion. I'm not sure if it was a propane bottle getting too hot or simply an inrush of air caused by the shop's skylight shattering, but, groggy and shirtless, I had to walk out front and see with my own eyes just how bad things really were.



It was pretty bad...

All told, I lost all of my tools, a ton of parts and raw materials, five motorcycles, and all of my riding gear in the fire. So pretty much every one of my hobbies disappeared in an instant.












Allstate treated us amazingly well, even if none of the motorcycles were covered. I immediately (too immediately if you ask my wife...) used the insurance money to start replacing my toys, then I began the process of cleaning up the mess, permitting, and building the dream shop that would replace my old shack.

Throughout that time, I've watched hundreds of hours of YouTube videos and read hundreds of forum threads (mostly here) and code books in an attempt to transform myself into a knowledgeable and competent builder, as no way was I going to be able to afford to hire somebody to build what I had in mind. Nope, I had been reading Garage Journal, and if there's one thing that Garage Journal had taught me, it's that overkill doesn't exist!

My rule for any project is to multiply what I think it's going to cost by two and multiply how long I think it's going to take by three, and I'll probably end up close. This has been no exception, so I should have seen the five year build coming, even if I'm not too happy about it. I didn't want to post pictures and stories of the build in real time, as I didn't want to be under pressure to get it done, but I think I'm at the point now where it's ready to share. And, with so much of what I learned to get me through the process learned here, this is definitely the place to do so.

I'll try to update this thread until I get caught up. More pictures and less words--I promise! Just wanted to introduce myself and thank everyone here for the advice (whether you knew you were giving it to me or not) and inspiration before I launch into the build. And hopefully telling the story will take a lot less than five years...

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Ouch. Looking forward to your adventure back from the disaster.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Hey Tom. Thomas here too. I support, can’t wait to see you rebuild. Bigger, better, stronger.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

GeddyT said:

We found just such a place, with the caveat being that, at the peak of the 2008 bubble, a house with land on which to build a shop was either going to be too expensive or ten million years old. Ours is the latter, and we've found since that the movie The Money Pit was a documentary.

Click to expand...

I laughed out loud at your last sentence. At least you can look at it with humor....this part I mean.

GeddyT said:

It was pretty bad. All told, I lost all of my tools, a ton of parts and raw materials, five motorcycles, and all of my riding gear in the fire. So pretty much every one of my hobbies disappeared in an instant.

Click to expand...

Double OUCH!

GeddyT said:

Nope, I had been reading Garage Journal, and if there's one thing that Garage Journal had taught me, it's that overkill doesn't exist!

Click to expand...

True that!

GeddyT said:

My rule for any project is to multiply what I think it's going to cost by two and multiply how long I think it's going to take by three, and I'll probably end up close.

Click to expand...

You may be a bit tongue-in-cheek there but it's the truth......sad as it can be. Looking forward to see what you've come up with.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Okay, it looks like I lied a little bit. I promised to be more photo-heavy and word-light moving forward, but the first post in the shop build is going to have to be more of the former due to the lack of pictures (they're at the end if you want to scroll down). I don't have enough posts yet to link to a video that shows the setup of my property at the time of the fire, but I'll add that when I do for context.

So there's a fire, my little shop is burnt to a crisp, and a couple of cool things follow, both involving the insurance company. The first is that they sent in a pair of badass fire investigators from out of town. They can't find the source of the fire, which is a shame, as I would have liked to know (if the new shop were to burn down, it would be a lot more sad!). The second thing that happened, a week or so later, was Allstate bringing in a 20 yard dumpster and hiring a cleaning crew to throw everything into it. The insurance adjuster was there, talking on the phone to somebody back at the office who was recording everything down. I had spent the previous week thinking of everything I could think of that I had in that shop, looking up online where and for how much it could be purchased, and dropping this shopping list into the adjuster's hands. She said thanks, but she was still going to have to catalog everything anyway.

And boy did she. The cleaning crew would pull things out and lay them in the driveway, she would list each thing off into her phone, then the cleaning crew would throw it into the dumpster. If I wanted to keep it, I could, and Allstate would still replace it. Which was nice, but very little survived. This cataloging was incredibly thorough. I'm talking, "Screwdriver. Phillips. Tekton brand."

Still, I had to help her out with a lot of things: "Trust me, that puddle up there used to be a box full of ultra high molecular weight polyethylene bar stock."

"What the hell is that? And why would you have it?"

"It's useful for making bushings and sliding bearings and whatnot. I like to build stuff!"

In the end, her valuation of the shop contents exceeded the shopping list I gave her by an easy 50%, so I was pretty happy!

Actually, there was one more thing that the insurance company had to do, only this was the automotive side of things. See, my wife was in a pretty big panic while the fire was going on (she claims that's why she forgot that I was home, not anything more nefarious...), and she was scrambling to move the cars clear of the fire while on the phone with 911. So she forgot to close the door of the van before putting it in reverse and hauling *** down the driveway. The tree next to the driveway had something to say about that:



From there, it was all about getting started on rebuilding. Rebuilding the best shop I would be allowed to build. So I started getting bids.

Of the three contractors that agreed to bid the job, two showed up. One could get started in a couple of years. The other seemed pretty disinterested and gave me a quote for a generic building that was nothing like what I described, and it was still going to cost well over $100K.

Well that was a waste of a couple of months, so guess I'll have to build myself. Okay, then, I'm going to need help in the plans/permitting phase. I called a local drafting/permitting shop that one of the builders recommended were I to go it on my own. They put me off for a few weeks, showed up, then quoted me over $10K for plans and permits. For a shop. Okaaay, time to start reading local building codes and learning Chief Architect...

Learning how to design the building and generate plans took quite a bit of time. In the meantime, I talked to the country permitting office about what I would need to do to get started. They gave me the permit application and told me I'd need to submit a site plan first before I could apply for a permit. Luckily, I got connected with a local drafter who produced a site plan for me for a very reasonable price, and that got the ball rolling. Right into a brick wall.

About a week later, I come home from work to find pink ribbon ******* in random spots along the edge of my property. A few days after that, I get a letter in the mail from the county. A very threatening letter. If you watched the linked video above, you'd see that I've got a little dirt bike track on the back third of my property. This was the very first project we undertook after moving in! Cleared out a bunch of blackberries and alder saplings, found an old burn pile full of glass and charred bed springs and cleaned that up, and cut a little track in to ride on with the kids.

Apparently you can't just do that, even on your own property. You can't even cut a tree down without asking! To make matters worse, there's a seasonal stormwater creek (more of a trickle, and it dries up in the summer) that runs through the corner of the neighboring property which had been getting bigger and bigger the more the development up the hill from us expands. The letter stated that the county had found that I'd done illegal clearing and tree cutting in a wetland ("wetland!?...") buffer zone, and the county would assess fines and refuse all building permits until this "damage" had been mitigated.

They provided a list of 30 wetland biologists, and I was required to hire one to perform a wetland survey and determine a mitigation plan. I chose one at random, had him out to look at the place, hired him, and then he put me off for over four months. I eventually got tired of him, fired him, hired a bigger (read: more expensive) outfit, and two weeks later I had my survey and mitigation plan in place.

On the upside, I didn't have to plant a million plants and open a savings account and do all of the other dumb things they could have made me do for mitigation. The biologists sided with me, agreed it was stupid, and came up with buffer averaging as the mitigation plan--essentially, the opposite corner of my property is now a conservation easement to make up for the wetland buffer that was cleared. Fine. On the downside, it was $2000 and six months delay for absolutely nothing.

Oh yeah, at some point in there this happened:







So at least a little progress in the first year...

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

wasfast said:

You may be a bit tongue-in-cheek there but it's the truth......sad as it can be. Looking forward to see what you've come up with.

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Sadly, I wasn't being tongue-in-cheek at all. The x2$/x3t rule is a pretty good guideline with my projects. Underestimating costs usually due to all of the little things that add up, underestimating time because I somehow always forget that I have to squeeze these projects in between the full-time-plus job that pays the bills. It's the ultimate catch-22: have to work in order to have the money to play, but then you lack the time to play with said money!

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

And now that I have five posts, here's the promised video of my little backyard track that got the county's ******* so up in a bunch. Hopefully I have the permission settings set correctly so it plays...

Also, it's probably worth pointing out that the building site of the new shop had zero impact on this "wetland." The county was just holding the completely unrelated shop building permit over my head to settle an eight year old score that neither of us previously knew about. Fun!

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

I guess someone has already said it: It could have been worse. Admittedly it was a real fustercluck.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

At least you've made it this far retaining your sense of humor! Dealing with bureaucracy can drive you insane if you let it. Kudos to you for pressing forward..

Great little track you made, I used to do the same with my boys years ago.

I'm in with popcorn!

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

GeddyT said:

The letter stated that the county had found that I'd done illegal clearing and tree cutting in a wetland ("wetland!?...") buffer zone, and the county would assess fines and refuse all building permits until this "damage" had been mitigated.

Click to expand...

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Can’t wait to see more...


Sent from my iPhone using Garage Journal

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

I'm in looking foward to how this turns out,

My line is, time, money, ambition,
You need all 3 to get stuff done!

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

What a story so far. Sorry to hear of the loss, and I'm in for the updates.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

There have been 3-4 GJ members that have posted their garage fire stories in threads here and the rebuilding process.

How many hand tools were able to be salvaged? Sockets, wrenches etc.


Hopefully one of the additions to the new garage will be a fire alarm system?

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Nice post, I have built three shops 24 x 24 and (2) 24 x 36, I went to Home depot and got a set of plans that were close to the size I wanted and a plot map I got when I bought my house.
I went in to get my permit and told them these plans are for a 24 x 30 but mine is going to be 24 x 36 and they said ok and made a note on my plans. I laid out the location of the new shop on the plot map and they accepted that as well. This was in Portland Or.
The cement work was about the third the cost of the building, finding a good contractor was key, I was lucky enough that a friend from grade school was a good contractor.
My brother in law just had (2) 24 x 36 metal building on top of slabs just put up. He said they were cheaper than stick frame. I prefer sick frame, my shop is built with 2 x 6 walls that are insulated, I like to have music in the shop, "sometimes loud" so I can hear it with earmuffs on when I'm fabricating.
Good luck on your build, looking forward to see you in your new shop

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Yikes. Glad everything is moving the right direction now. Can't wait to see the new setup.

~Jim~

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

captain14 said:

There have been 3-4 GJ members that have posted their garage fire stories in threads here and the rebuilding process.

How many hand tools were able to be salvaged? Sockets, wrenches etc.


Hopefully one of the additions to the new garage will be a fire alarm system?

Click to expand...

The problem with fires when it comes to hand tools is that most are made of steel, so not only is there the heat from the fire, but a ton of water then gets sprayed in to put the fire out. The heat of the fire accelerates the rusting process quite a bit. I saved a bag of specialty tools (crank pullers, case splitters, etc.), meaning to soak them in vinegar to try saving them, but never got around to it and ended up throwing them away.

I kept some larger specialty tools in the bottom drawer of my tool chest. Things like leakdown testers and rivnut installers that have their own blow-molded cases. Being low to the ground, inside the tool chest drawer, and inside individual cases seems to have saved these tools, so pretty much the only tools I still have were those in that drawer.

In a way, I didn't mind too much. The fire wiped out my entire tool collection, but it was very cobbled together, mostly at a time when I didn't know better and could only afford the cheapest option. The tool I bought at 18 isn't necessarily the tool I'd buy now at 40. There were a (very) few tools that I just loved, and I've since replaced all of them (Harbor Freight motorcycle lift, Brownline digital torque wrench, and this cheap 3/8" ratchet that I absolutely love come to mind). Most of the tools I was very happy to replace with better options.

The cool thing was that I got paid quite handsomely for a few custom tools I made. One that stands out is the crosscut sled I made for the table saw, which consisted of a sheet of MDF, a 2x4 backing board, and two aluminum T-slot rails from Amazon. Of course the insurance adjuster couldn't find a crosscut sled readily available for sale, but she did manage to find some German-made precision sheet good cutting contraption, so my $50 crosscut sled netted me four figures!

Really, the only thing in the shop that I was genuinely sad to lose was the old Yamaha MX80 dirt bike. I found it in a shipping container at my in-laws' house in pretty rough shape. It was my brother in-law's bike when he was a kid, and, being a 1980, it was built the same year I was! I drug it over the mountains home, removed the animal nest from the airbox, replaced the carburetor, put a new piston on it, and it had become the bike that I could ride the kids around the yard on. Loved that thing, and there's no replacing it.

Oh, and smoke alarms are DEFINITELY in the new shop! More importantly, though, is that the new shop should be a lot more fireproof with its construction. Hopefully I never find out.

BORING HOP YARD said:

Nice post, I have built three shops 24 x 24 and (2) 24 x 36, I went to Home depot and got a set of plans that were close to the size I wanted and a plot map I got when I bought my house.
I went in to get my permit and told them these plans are for a 24 x 30 but mine is going to be 24 x 36 and they said ok and made a note on my plans. I laid out the location of the new shop on the plot map and they accepted that as well. This was in Portland Or.
The cement work was about the third the cost of the building, finding a good contractor was key, I was lucky enough that a friend from grade school was a good contractor.
My brother in law just had (2) 24 x 36 metal building on top of slabs just put up. He said they were cheaper than stick frame. I prefer sick frame, my shop is built with 2 x 6 walls that are insulated, I like to have music in the shop, "sometimes loud" so I can hear it with earmuffs on when I'm fabricating.
Good luck on your build, looking forward to see you in your new shop

Click to expand...

I considered the pole/metal building route, as it would have saved me tens of thousands of dollars. The problem is that this shop, as the one before it, would be sitting 20 feet from a 100 year old craftsman house, and it's very difficult to match a metal building. You can trim and side a pole building to look like anything, but I couldn't find a local pole building installer that wanted to do it. Plus I kind of wanted to do it myself...

This is actually a pretty good segue to today's installment:

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Wow, crazy story, and first off thanks for sharing. Looking forward to following along on your journey to rebuild. Man i couldn't image, at least it was the garage and not your house.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Nice tale of a tragic change in the arc of your life.

Make a plan, stay with the plan and complete to full finish what you start.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

As mentioned above, it took quite a while to get from burnt down old shop to building permits for new shop due to all of the red tape and runaround. In my county, building permits are numbered with a code that starts with the year in which it was pulled. Our fire was in May of 2015, my building permit starts with "2017." Enough said...

At least this gave me plenty of time to research local and international building codes, learn architectural CAD software, and generate plans for my building. Having recently been turned on to the existence of this forum, my first design iteration demonstrated that I was maybe drinking a little too much of the GJ Kool Aid...





This 42 x 32 monstrosity was what I originally dreamed up. Ceiling would be vaulted in the front half to accommodate a car lift, and the back half would have an upstairs room to use as my wife's photography studio. Bathroom and woodworking room beneath.

This didn't last long. The county told me that were I to build something that big, it would increase my impervious surfaces by more than 500 ft², which would mean I'd have to install a stormwater management system. After making some calls, I couldn't even get Geotest to come out and test the soil and water table for less than $5K, then the system would have to be engineered...

So less than 500 additional ft² it would be. After fudging the numbers as far as I thought I possibly could, this left it at 1120 ft². Suddenly, the square footage that staircase would occupy became precious. A whole dedicated woodworking room became more of a luxury than a need. I also had some sense talked into me as to what all of this would cost.

Some number crunching followed. The 1120 ft² footprint limitation wasn't my only constraint. The Boss gave me another directive: "Your stupid shop canNOT be taller than the house!"

It was for this reason that I had planned to vault the ceiling to make room for a lift. If I put the lift right in the middle, I could have lower base walls and keep the shop (barely) shorter than the house next to it. After crunching some numbers, though, I figured I could raise the walls to 12 feet, have a flat ceiling with storage above, using attic trusses and gable (ladder) access, and maintain more than a thousand square feet of shop space below. And it would... maybe... still be shorter than the house. Hopefully she wouldn't notice...

Having zero experience with architectural software, building code and conventions, etc., I was pretty proud of the plans I submitted to the county:



As you can see, the compromise landed on 40' x 28', stick framed, small bathroom in the back corner. A friend talked me into radiant slab heat, which in Washington State means the building then has to meet energy code. So R21 walls, R49 attic, and 1.5 energy credits elsewhere. I already planned to crush these numbers, as I hate pumping money into the air, so no big deal. But it did increase scrutiny of the build process quite a bit.



Washington building code halves the shear wall unbraced length requirement, meaning twice as stringent. So I had to have the sheer wall nailing schedule and foundation tie-ins engineered. I also had to have the garage door header engineered, as there's no prescriptive code for an 18' opening.





Grade would be lowered 6" to help satisfy the prime height directive. The stick framed walls would sit on foundation walls that come up 2' above grade. It's awfully wet up here for half the year, and I don't want the bottom of my walls rotting out like on the old shop. Also helps keep the critters from gnawing through. Also saved me from yet more engineering, as 10' wood walls are the cutoff before engineering is required.

As proud as I was of my plans and design, the plan review with the county didn't go so well. There were a couple minor problems they had, but the major one was the full-length attic storage I proposed. The reviewer pulled out his ruler and measured the area of the room, concluding that it was quite a bit bigger than 200 ft². When I asked him why that was significant, he asked in return how I planned on accessing that room. "Access door in the south gable, reached by ladder. It's just a storage room."

Not acceptable. An attic room larger than 200 ft² has to be accessible via code-compliant staircase such and such wide and blah blah blah. Frustrated and already sick of the delays, I grabbed his red pen, put a big X through all but the southernmost eight trusses, notated "these trusses standard," and said, "There. Twelve times 14 feet is less than 200. We good?"

It's a shame. Attic trusses make for the cheapest square footage money can buy, and I went from 480 ft² to 168 ft². Still better than nothing.

For the last details of the plans, I wanted to try to match the shop to the house as closely as possible. This would mean craftsman window and door casings, knee braces under the eaves, etc. Hardy siding is a great product that I wanted to use, so I would get the smallest reveal Hardy siding I could get. Here's a picture of the old shop peaking around the corner of the house:



This picture was right off the listing from when we bought the place. It may have been a dilapidated shed, but the old shop looked like it belonged there from 40 feet away, and I wanted to keep that aesthetic with the new one.

With plans approved in early 2017, the only thing left to do for a while was wait. We're in the Lake Whatcom watershed, which means seasonal ground disturbance bans that don't lift until June 1st. There would definitely be some ground disturbance. For starters, the old shop was carved into a short hill, with the grade under the lean-to in the back being a couple feet higher than the grade in the front, as seen here:



We would at the very least need to level that whole area out, but we had big plans for the property, seeing hows we'd have an excavator out anyway. More to come on that.

In the meantime, my wife couldn't wait for construction to get underway. She was getting awfully tired of scenes like this in the living room:



And activities like this taking place on the dining room table...

Tomorrow we'll cut down some big trees.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Some pro photography skills there.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

atnfromatl said:

Some pro photography skills there.

Click to expand...

Funny you mention that. My wife actually made photography a full-time job in the summer of 2016, building up a business that is doing quite well now. The pictures posted so far were before this happened and before she really started studying, attending workshops, and getting much, much better. Also before several rounds of equipment upgrades.

It started when we bought a Panasonic GH2 before my son was born. I wanted something that would take both good pictures and good video of the baby, and, although conventional wisdom had me researching between Canon and Nikon, it soon became clear that there was this cult following for the quirky little Panasonic M43 cameras. Eventually, I was convinced and bought into the system.

I geeked out on it at first, then my wife really jumped in with both feet. We upgraded to a GH4 at some point, bought some really amazing Leica branded glass for it, and she even managed to build a business with that little thing, shooting families and newborns and whatnot. To this day, I've never used a camera that has better ergonomics, is more user friendly, and has such simple controls for getting done what you want to get done. Shooting manual is a breeze. Switching between still and video is seamless. The articulating touchscreen should be ubiquitous by now, yet some manufacturers still haven't gotten the memo. The Panasonic GH series really is the ultimate hybrid shooter, and I say this after she's since upgraded to the larger sensor Sony platform.

The first half of this story will feature a mix of cell phone shots and nice pictures from the GH2/GH4. I gave the GH2 away and then, shortly after, the GH4 battery terminal broke. I dissected the camera trying to fix it (dumb), made it much worse, and my beloved GH4 still sits in pieces in a ziploc bag to this day. So, sadly, the second half of this story will be illustrated by crappy cell phone pics, as the Sony is largely verboten. Oh well.

This actually has me thinking I need to make my bi-monthly pilgrimage to eBay to look for a decent M43 body to replace it with. That glass is FAR too nice to be sitting there gathering dust.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

For the attic square footage, could you not simply omit a floor in the area that would put you over the limit and retain the attic trusses? Seems way over reaching and down right stupid to require a full staircase when it's neither needed nor wanted.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Along for the ride to see your replacement garage!

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Motorcycles, tools, Craftsman Style garage build....I'm in for the long haul. Good luck.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Sorry about the bad luck, but at least no one got harmed!

I'm going to be watching this build also!

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Man that had to be hard to watch go up in flames. Thank God it wasn't your house, though.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Bigblockyeti said:

For the attic square footage, could you not simply omit a floor in the area that would put you over the limit and retain the attic trusses? Seems way over reaching and down right stupid to require a full staircase when it's neither needed nor wanted.

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I'm not sure I could have gotten away with keeping attic trusses where there would be no attic room. To the plan reviewer, attic truss = room. I suppose I might have been able to cross them out, buy them anyway, and hope to get away with it, but at that point I was just tired of fighting and delays and wanted to get on with it.

In retrospect, I think the county might have saved me from myself in this instance, as, having carried things up and down that ladder a few times now, I'm not exactly sure home much stuff I want to actually store up there... Definitely not 500 ft² worth! I'm already thinking I should build an exterior staircase up to that attic door someday, and I'm wishing I would have made that door taller than 5 ft. If I ever go through with all of that, THEN I'll be mad at the county for robbing me of that extra storage! For now, meh.

Farmall450 said:

Man that had to be hard to watch go up in flames. Thank God it wasn't your house, though.

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That's funny, because I just keep thinking, "Why couldn't it have been the house to burn instead of the shop full of all my stuff!?"

Only thing of real value in the house at the time that wasn't insured was me, and even that's debatable. And a new shop is nice, but a new house would have been REALLY nice. The fires tend to burn what they want and not what you want, though, so it is what it is.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

looking forward to pictures of your progress.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Anybody that builds a motor on the dining room table that is not single and has a wife, is worth paying attention to. I'm in for this story.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

***** to hear about the fire, but it sounds like you are on the right track for an awesome rebuild!!

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

rmack898 said:

Anybody that builds a motor on the dining room table that is not single and has a wife, is worth paying attention to. I'm in for this story.

Click to expand...

That table has seen more than one engine and in one case a whole bike!

I had to tear it down in the family room first:


But it eventually made it upstairs to that table for assembly:


When you have no shop, you have to get creative! Even before the fire, though, I was good at getting myself in trouble. I've been asked to not wash parts in the dishwasher anymore, and the oven is now off limits for heating crankcase halves for bearing installation. I also got in trouble once for trying to degrease parts on the stovetop in her 3 gallon stock pot full of Simple Green, mainly because the house stunk for two days.

Turns out the FoodSaver works alright for vacuum bagging carbon fiber parts in a pinch, and I've gotten away with that several times.

I think the most patient she's ever been, though, is when this broke out (and then became a regular fixture in the house for at least a year). There are still tire tracks on every door frame along that little loop from rubbing, but it was worth it. (Just ignore the pile of junkmail in the middle of the living room floor. We're not slobs, the kids just got a kick out of shredding and throwing paper.)

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Alright, back to the shop build.

Another one of the things that delayed construction was that we wouldn't just be building a shop, we'd also be completely transforming our property, so we also needed to get permits for tree removal and grading.

We bought our house in May, which means we only saw it at its best: grass green and mowed, shrubs blooming, trees nice and green, all that jazz. The backyard--almost all of the backyard--featured five huge trees (three fir and two cedar) in rock lined raised beds with bark paths between them. Again, this shot was right from the listing (before the leaves would come in):


It was like having our own little park in the spring and summer, and it was a real selling point when we bought the place. Reality hit that first winter, though, and every winter to follow. Those trees that provide shade in the summer make a huge mess all fall and winter, drop massive branches dangerously close to the house, and shed their weight in pine cones every year. What's beautiful and functional half the year is ugly and a pain the *** the other half.

Worse, those trees were gigantic and unprotected from wind. And 20 feet from my bedroom... We get some decent windstorms, and hearing those trees groan and seeing them sway right out the window scared the **** out of me.

They had to go, and there would be no getting big equipment back there once the new shop was in the way. It was now or never.

We pulled a permit to cut down 10 total trees. This list would grow to 12 once the foundation was poured and I realized there were a couple that would still be danger-close to the new shop, but it was 10 at first. Four scraggly pine trees along the driveway needed to go, as not only where they growing more out than up and looked like ****, but they would be in the way of the trench I'd need to dig to pull power to the shop (more on that later). The other six were in the backyard, the five in the middle of the yard and one HUGE one in the corner.

I got five bids for doing the job:
1.) $15,000 plus logs.
2.) $17,000 plus the logs.
3.) $8,000 plus the logs. You clean up.
4.) I know a guy who could drop the trees, I could yard them out with my excavator and clean up the limbs with the excavator and my dump truck. You sell the lumber, and I bet you could break even after paying me.
5.) I'll do it for the logs.

Number Five, come on down!

I actually worried that he'd underbid the job, so I told him I'd pay any cost overruns he encountered. It ended up taking two days longer than he thought, including an extra day with the rental chipper, and I tipped heavily because they were so awesome, so I ended up with a perfectly clean yard, three massive piles of wood chips (which come in handy), and no trees for only $3500. Which is one of the few wins of this whole story now that I think about it.

On to the visual aids!


That's the big guy in the corner of the property, with my daughter for size reference. The crew that cut these down was truly awesome to work with. The ratio of how hard and physical work is to how much the workers clearly LOVE every minute of it was something I'd never seen. Every tree that went down was a big celebration of revving saws and high-fives. And they were great about getting the kids involved and setting up cool pictures like the one above.

Maybe some of you have seen plenty of big trees dropped, but I've never cut down anything bigger than a wimpy alder that couldn't have possibly fallen on anything. As such, I was in awe of what these guys could do. Every tree landed exactly where they wanted to, even ones that were leaning toward the house. The five in the middle of the yard were dropped pretty much right on top of each other in a pile. This video of the big tree being dropped is probably longer than it needs to be, at over six minutes, but it was too awesome to trim down (no pun intended).




In this picture, you can see the beating that my poor jump took off on the right side if the image. The track would need some serious rehabilitation.



The process was to selectively limb each tree up for reasons they understood but I don't, the crew on the ground feeding those limbs into the chipper as the climber limbed, then they'd drop the tree, limb it on the ground the rest of the way, cut it into lengths, then drag each length behind the truck into a pile right behind where the old shop used to be.


This pile would grow, be hauled away, then be replaced with a new pile. Can't remember how many trucks these trees filled, but it was at least three.


Not something you see in your driveway every day!...

And that's pretty much it for tree removal--still probably my favorite part of this whole build. Tomorrow (hopefully) I'll post some sweet excavator ****.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

The inside the house motorcycle ride is just too funny. Great stuff...keep it coming.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

I like the doodle!

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Cool back yard track!

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Jagmandave said:

I like the doodle!

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Close! Just a poodle. My wife is allergic to... life? Pet dander is a big one. Hypoallergenic dog is not optional. I got the dog for my wife (under protest) as a puppy, but that dog has owned me from day one. Has me trained to turn the bathtub faucet on for her to drink, sleeps every night on my bed, etc.

She's 12 and declining rapidly, so a sad day is coming. Best dog I've ever had.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

I recently went thru a garage fire as well. My garage is connected to my house and I came home to it on fire. In my case I wanted to save my house so I opened the garage, grabbed the high pressure hose, and put out most of the fire before the first fire truck arrived. It wasn’t easy once the water was introduced. Between the steam and smoke I couldn’t see. I sucked in enough smoke to warrant a night in the hospital, but I kept the fire damage to the garage. The entire house had smoke damage, but was still intact. I ma glad you are on the other side of it now. It isn’t an easy thing to go thru or deal with.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Just noticed your from Bellingham. I'm up in Ferndale. Looking forward to seeing the progress.

Re: From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

Hpozzuoli said:

I recently went thru a garage fire as well. My garage is connected to my house and I came home to it on fire. In my case I wanted to save my house so I opened the garage, grabbed the high pressure hose, and put out most of the fire before the first fire truck arrived. It wasn’t easy once the water was introduced. Between the steam and smoke I couldn’t see. I sucked in enough smoke to warrant a night in the hospital, but I kept the fire damage to the garage. The entire house had smoke damage, but was still intact. I ma glad you are on the other side of it now. It isn’t an easy thing to go thru or deal with.

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Oh man... Yeah, attached garage would be a million times scarier. I joke about not caring if my house burnt down (we've had a lot of fights, my house and I), but in reality losing your home is a real gut punch. Sorry to hear you were hospitalized, too. Physically, my wife and I only suffered a little embarrassment.

How'd your insurance company treat you? And are you done rebuilding?

gordz32 said:

Just noticed your from Bellingham. I'm up in Ferndale. Looking forward to seeing the progress.

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Wow, small world! Was just in Ferndale a few weeks back to watch my daughter's basketball game. Jake Locker was coaching the Ferndale team, so that was pretty cool.