New Guy from Florida

[NomadDad]

Glad to finally join the forum!

My name is Ben and I'm on the west coast of Florida (Venice Island). While my family and I have moved many times around North America (20 times at last count) we think this is the last for a while. The kids are off to college and it's just the wife and dogs and I at home. I travel 100% supporting our factories and meeting with customers so the weekends and vacations are spent in the shop.

We just purchased a 5 area piece of property about 8 miles from our house so I can build a shop for storage of the cars/trucks/tools, provide a safe place during a hurricane, and so I can set up the workshop they way I want to.

I'm looking for ideas for shop designs and construction so I can make sure I plan everything out correctly. I am interesting in storing 6-8 cars while also leaving room for a wood shop, the car lift, a metal working area, and a small office/bunker so we can hunker down in a hurricane if necessary.

Will be reaching out for ideas and stealing shamelessly as we plan this out over the next month or two. Hoping to build it by the end of summer this year (2019)

 

[HOTFR8]

Welcome to the GJ.

 

[jafern14]

Hey welcome Ben! I've been looking to simply plan out my shop similar to what you've done and you can find a plethora of good ideas here in the forum from builds that have already been done. There are plenty of builds that also provide some sort of schematic at the beginning of the thread that outlines the design. It should be a really good start for you. Take a look in the Garage Gallery section where there are a lot of build threads.

Also if you haven't used it already you can use a tool called SketchUp or some other modelling software to help you build out your shop with dimensions and all. I like using these types of software for projects because it helps me to save my ideas for later if I ever want to get around to them and they're also very easy to change/modify. Say you had a really good idea late at night and you put pen to paper in this software and save it, but then you want to change something entirely the following day. This type of software makes it super quick and simple to do that so you can get moving faster!

Hope this helps.

 

[driftpin]

Contact these people, they have a long history of quality products. One of my friends built a 12,000 sq ft industrial building, a motorcycle shop, actually, and another friend was the GC, it went up easily, and years-later has stood the test of time. It's fully-insulated.
http://www.deansteelbuildings.com/