67CarGuy
Well-known member
Tabula Rasa
Latin for "blank slate," it is the idea of individuals being born empty of any built-in mental content, so that all knowledge comes from later perceptions or sensory experiences.
This will be a chronicle of my new shop/garage/house build and the projects I get up to in and around the same. If you saw my previous shop/garage, you’ll recall that the garage was rather small and quite inconvenient, and the shop was nowhere close to the size I wanted (and I know from reading countless threads on here that many of you share the same problems).
Well, hold on to your hats, folks…
While this won’t be a Don Long-sized space, or as beautifully photographed (and well used!) as Gregor’s, or as *chef’s kiss* as Jack Olsen’s, hopefully it will provide some encouragement to others, or at least provoke thoughtful conversation (“Jeez, why the hell did he do it that way?”).
A little backstory:
Several years ago (during the pandemic) my wife and I decided that we were sick of dealing with the humidity of the Baltimore/DC area (I know it’s not as bad as it gets further south, but it’s still not enjoyable) and wanted to be closer to family in the New England area. We also missed snow and people using their turn signals. Thanks to the wonder that is remote work, we were both able to keep our existing jobs while moving north to the Boston area. What we thought would be a 1-2 year rental situation while we found a good house (with room for the dog to run around, a garage larger than 8x18, and space for a shop, among other wants and needs) turned into a very frustrating search as seemingly “all the good houses” weren’t available, for all the reasons many of you know. We also didn’t want a 5000 sqft house on a 1/4 acre lot - I grew up in rural Vermont, and after spending the last 20 years of my life living in cities, I wanted to get back to the quiet countryside.
What we eventually found was a three acre lot that was once a field of some sort, overgrown and untended for the past ~40 years. Lots of vines (I thought grapevine was bad until I was introduced to oriental bittersweet!), thorns, pucker brush, you get the idea. A few saving graces: an old stone wall, running nearly due north/south (I haven’t checked it with a compass, but it’s gotta be no more than 1-2 degrees off); an existing sassafras grove; numerous oak, birch, ash, hickory, and other trees that will be kept for as long as they’re healthy; and one ~14 inch walnut tree that needed to come down to make way for a septic field and will become furniture. More on that walnut later.
Above you can begin to get an idea of how overgrown the lot was - vines everywhere, which we valiantly attacked with various handheld tools (loppers and chainsaws, mostly) until we had a more complete idea of what we were going to do with the site. Then we brought in heavy equipment. More to come on that, too.
We’ve spent the last ~18 months working with a high efficiency modular home builder to design a house that fits many of our criteria. There have been many, many frustrating moments throughout this process, but we finally have a delivery date (early May 2024!), a GC that actually communicates with us on a (mostly) regular basis, and a cost breakdown that fits our budget. The attached garage will be an oversize 2-car (28x30), while the basement shop will be roughly 13x28. I’ve slowly been collecting tools, projects*, and ideas, and those will slowly unfold and reveal themselves in the coming months and years. I’ll get some floor plans posted up here shortly.
*Pending projects:
Latin for "blank slate," it is the idea of individuals being born empty of any built-in mental content, so that all knowledge comes from later perceptions or sensory experiences.
This will be a chronicle of my new shop/garage/house build and the projects I get up to in and around the same. If you saw my previous shop/garage, you’ll recall that the garage was rather small and quite inconvenient, and the shop was nowhere close to the size I wanted (and I know from reading countless threads on here that many of you share the same problems).
Well, hold on to your hats, folks…
While this won’t be a Don Long-sized space, or as beautifully photographed (and well used!) as Gregor’s, or as *chef’s kiss* as Jack Olsen’s, hopefully it will provide some encouragement to others, or at least provoke thoughtful conversation (“Jeez, why the hell did he do it that way?”).
A little backstory:
Several years ago (during the pandemic) my wife and I decided that we were sick of dealing with the humidity of the Baltimore/DC area (I know it’s not as bad as it gets further south, but it’s still not enjoyable) and wanted to be closer to family in the New England area. We also missed snow and people using their turn signals. Thanks to the wonder that is remote work, we were both able to keep our existing jobs while moving north to the Boston area. What we thought would be a 1-2 year rental situation while we found a good house (with room for the dog to run around, a garage larger than 8x18, and space for a shop, among other wants and needs) turned into a very frustrating search as seemingly “all the good houses” weren’t available, for all the reasons many of you know. We also didn’t want a 5000 sqft house on a 1/4 acre lot - I grew up in rural Vermont, and after spending the last 20 years of my life living in cities, I wanted to get back to the quiet countryside.
What we eventually found was a three acre lot that was once a field of some sort, overgrown and untended for the past ~40 years. Lots of vines (I thought grapevine was bad until I was introduced to oriental bittersweet!), thorns, pucker brush, you get the idea. A few saving graces: an old stone wall, running nearly due north/south (I haven’t checked it with a compass, but it’s gotta be no more than 1-2 degrees off); an existing sassafras grove; numerous oak, birch, ash, hickory, and other trees that will be kept for as long as they’re healthy; and one ~14 inch walnut tree that needed to come down to make way for a septic field and will become furniture. More on that walnut later.
Above you can begin to get an idea of how overgrown the lot was - vines everywhere, which we valiantly attacked with various handheld tools (loppers and chainsaws, mostly) until we had a more complete idea of what we were going to do with the site. Then we brought in heavy equipment. More to come on that, too.
We’ve spent the last ~18 months working with a high efficiency modular home builder to design a house that fits many of our criteria. There have been many, many frustrating moments throughout this process, but we finally have a delivery date (early May 2024!), a GC that actually communicates with us on a (mostly) regular basis, and a cost breakdown that fits our budget. The attached garage will be an oversize 2-car (28x30), while the basement shop will be roughly 13x28. I’ve slowly been collecting tools, projects*, and ideas, and those will slowly unfold and reveal themselves in the coming months and years. I’ll get some floor plans posted up here shortly.
*Pending projects:
- Panelized garage build & fit-out
- Basement shop build & fit-out
- Build a cyclekart
- Build a Maslow CNC
- Finish the rebuild of a small block Chevy 400, for an as-yet undetermined vehicle. Brodix heads, rotating assembly from a short-track racecar, Jesel rockers... should be a fun little mill
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