Between 705 & 1200 SQ/FT New Mexico Workshop, new member

[AllenV]

Hi all, I am a new member. Thought I'd introduce myself.
A dozen years ago I was "lurking" here looking for insight on my shop construction project. I finished it quite a while back and now my son is seriously thinking about a new shop at his place.

What I did is build a 40x26x12ft stick building with a stucco exterior matching our home and southwest neighborhood. The floors are 6" fiber reinforced concrete with parts that are 8" thick under the two-post lift. Floors are standard commercial vinyl tile. Lighting is LED replacement units in the original 4 ft fluorescent fixtures.

2x6 framing in walls. Lots of insulation. Package heating/cooling unit on roof.

The north-face clerestory windows have proven to be a very nice feature as they bring in plenty of natural light and don't cause much heat loss in winter.

 

[4xdog]

Nice!

That looks like my dream place, as I try to plan for retirement to NM with my vehicles and bicycles over the next year.

Subscribing to this thread fershure.

 

[AllenV]

The 12 ft ceiling is just enough for me to hang bicycles from the ceiling and still walk under without ducking.

 

[zmotorsports]

Very nice shop you have there and welcome.

 

[el monte slim]

That's a great-looking and well-equipped shop. Welcome to the forum.

 

[AllenV]

Thank you. Its a second-generation shop. My Dad built one in the 60s while I was a kid in California. He recently passed and now I have the bitter-sweet prospect of collecting the "family" Clausing Lathe and Hardinge Mill. After refurbishment the family tools may replace my existing Enco units.

 

[Zoidberg]

How did you build it? Got any pics from the construction?

 

[AllenV]

You have inspired to open the archives. The shop was built in late 2005. I designed it. But did not have enough "spare" time to do the construction on my own. I had a contractor do the site prep and build a bare minimum "garage" for me. The attached photos show what was built in this initial phase. (I have several contractor horror stories for another day!) You can see it is a basic rectangle, 26x40 with 12 foot interior ceilings. Height is to accommodate a two-post lift and to fit with a 15 ft exterior height limit imposed by my neighborhood covenant.
The concrete slab is interesting. My lot is very sandy soil. I took the advice of a local home builder and had the footing and interior slab floor poured as one piece. This is intended to help the whole thing settle and shift as a unit over the years. Concrete is all fiber reinforced. It is 6 inches thick except where I called out an 8 inch region at the light post locations.
The rest is pretty standard stick and stucco with a flat roof. Walls are 2x6. Roof is trusses. On top is an AC/gas-heat combo unit. 3-ton cooling capacity. You can see that I had the duct work run exposed below the ceiling. This allowed me to stuff the ceiling with the maximum amount of insulation.

 

[AllenV]

Once the "shell" was completed, I got busy and finished it out. The patio was added per the plan. (Note that I had the contractor install a header for the patio roof.)

 

[AllenV]

Then I got to work on the inside. Wired with a 100A panel for 120VAC and 240VAC ( sorry, no images ) The 240VAC is run as 4-wire with 1 outlet per wall plus a hardwired ceiling box for the lift.
The lift was installed with the priceless help of several friends. The lift went in BFEORE dry-wall. This allowed me to use the trusses to attached block-and-tackle to tip the posts up.
Insulation is standard fiberglass ( again no images ).
After drywall I put up the big south wall storage shelf and the larger "upstairs" little storage area.
Finally the floor went in. Here I used vinyl tile (VCO). I like the tile. I have never bothered to wax it. BUT, the main reason I used the tile is that the fiber reinforced concrete has fiber hairs poking out of the surface. This left me uncertain that any sort of epoxy floor would go down smooth.

 

[davo727]

Clerestory..... had to look that one up. Very nice shop. And everyone wants to hear the contractor stories

 

[53PontiacSD]

Of course, we do want to hear. I'm sure we all have similar stories, only the names are changed, hopefully.

Billy

By the way, it is a very nice shop.

 

[AllenV]

Okay, here is the most amusing contractor horror story. Although this was the root cause of a roof leak that appeared much later.

Here in the southwest we have a strange attachment to homes with flat roofs. Mine is no different. To keep the same look and feel the shop also has a flat roof. Flat roofs comprise a parapet wall on the perimeter with occasional drains penetrating the wall to let the water out. In the southwest we call these drains “canales”. A boat person would call them “scuppers”.

The builder erected four uninterrupted parapet walls and sheeted these with OSB. I imagined the plan was to install canales at a later stage. Some weeks later he called me to say that the roof had been completed. Encouraged by this impulse of activity I inspected the situation when I got home from work. I could see, from the ground, the water proof treatment at the parapet tops. Eventually I realized that I was not seeing canales! Climbing to the roof revealed a beautiful bathtub of tar-and-gravel with no way for rain water to exit.

An immediate phone call to the building started the blame game. He blamed the roofer. The roofer claimed the builder had not asked for canales. It was clear that both had just “phoned it in”. A few days later the specified four canaled were installed. I don’t know of these were done by the builder or the roofer.