RVDan
Well-known member
My 12x18 two storey workshop.
My Dad built it around thirty years ago. The original plan was it was a storage shed, with a root cellar below, and a playhouse for the kids above.
Those plans never really worked out. For a little while, it was actually a two storey storage shed, long enough to get the permits signed off as completed. Us kids were grown up and moved out long before the upstairs was ever safe for kids to play in. Actually I don't think it ever acheived safe status.
For twenty five years my Dad constantly changed it. It never hit a point of completion on any of his incarnations, and at the point when I bought the property from my Parents last May, it was a pathetic mess. A combination of woodworking shop and greenhouse was the plan, but mostly it was just a used lumber storage box. The floor was now two feet above the foundation and hanging cantilevered three feet outside of the foundation, but only over half of the foundation, a quarter of the space was stacked lumber from ground level to roof. The remaining quarter of the space was just an open void that was planned to be all glass greenhouse.
So here you can see the building in the background before I touched it. Luckily the trees cover a lot of the uglyness. You can see it looks like a chunk of roof is simply missing, and the vertical and horizontal lines that somewhat look like windows from a distance, is actually racks of used lumber.
A view of the end of the building, there is no sheeting, in fact on this end it was downright scary with regards to the support posts, but thats irrelevant, it was stacked with scrap lumber so tight nothing was going to come down
So as it sat, it was a completely unuseable building for me. It was simply nothiing but scrap lumber storage, and under the floor which was now two feet above the foundation was a crawlspace used for storage, and it was packed full.
My plan started with gutting it out. I thought I could keep the existing walls. After hauling out ten truck loads of lumber, and then attempting to tear out the plywood rack and workbench, I found that the workbench and plywood rack were structural components
Final decision, keep the foundation and the roof, and build new in between. Bylaws say that my accessory building has to be under fifteen feet tall. A lot of measuring, head scratching, and drawing, and the building is fifteen feet tall, the bottom floor is sixteen inches below grade, and has an eight foot ceiling. The second floor has a low ceiling but its still comfortable enough with the floor to ridge beam height being 80" I get a space eight feet wide and eighteen feet long where the ceiling is higher than six feet. Oops thats a run-on sentence.
So it began. Supporting the roof was tricky. Actually it was beyond tricky, it sucked every which way you look at it. Sawzall and sledgehammer for demolition of the original building, and I only removed as much as I had to in order to keep the roof supported. I put posts in wherever I could whenever I could, moving them as I needed to.
Here it is at a point where the bottom floor walls are in and the floor joists are in. The roof is supported at this point by A-frame suports on the floor joists. Yeah the roof twisted a lot, it was heavy, and the overhangs used to be supported off the floor.
Working around a huge amount of scrap lumber still, Saturday is the only day I can get rid of scrap lumber, so its been a long process getting rid of 14 truck loads of scrap lumber so far.
Not a lot of pictures of the process, there are just some things you don't want to be reminded of sometimes. I almost feel bad about tearing out my Dads lifes work, but I'm sure that will pass when I finally get to roll my bike in and change the oil to get ready for the first ride of the season.
Today.
I started pouring the concrete floor Easter Sunday. When my Dad build it originally, the floor was 2x4 framed sitting on top of the footer, and about half of it was still the original, although rotted, I could have used it. The other half though was a mixed up combination of concrete slab in inexplicable shapes, and two foundation walls coming up six inches above floor level, plus some boxed in areas, again for enexplicable reasons. I considered just framing around things and building a wood floor at the highest level, but there was already twenty bags of cement and three yards of Navvy Jack in the yard.
After ripping out all the plywood and framing, I found a huge crater in the dirt underneath it. That solved my problem of the thousands of pounds of broken concrete in the yard from all the numerous other projects my Dad half built and then demolished. I couldn't bury it all in there, but I got rid of a good amount of it
I'm not real proud of the floor. Its got a high spot in the middle, its not real smooth, and since I couldn't do it all in one pour, it looks like a patchwork quilt. I'm happy its done.
A long way to go yet, but already the upstairs, even though there are no stairs yet, has become a storage area. Note the oil stain on my brand new plywood. I stepped on the bottle of air tool oil.
I picked up a 34" entry door for the ground level entry. The four foot wide opening will eventually get a small scale garage door. I have a 36" door for the upstairs entry, it will open outwards onto a landing, there are four steps inside the door opening to get upstairs. The door had to be lower than floor level due to the limited headroom, I couldn't have put a proper header over the door had I built it in higher.
The opening under the upstairs door opening will be a storage closet under the landing, accesible from inside. I figured that was wasted space anyway, might as well use it.
Obviously the bottom floor is 16" below the door opening, stairs are fine for people, what about getting bikes in and out? My motorcycle lift will act as an elevator
Next? I think finish the end walls on the top floor, then finish sheeting it, and tar paper while I try to figure out what to do for siding. Possibly cut the stair stringers and build the landing during the week too.
I'll update as things happen
My Dad built it around thirty years ago. The original plan was it was a storage shed, with a root cellar below, and a playhouse for the kids above.
Those plans never really worked out. For a little while, it was actually a two storey storage shed, long enough to get the permits signed off as completed. Us kids were grown up and moved out long before the upstairs was ever safe for kids to play in. Actually I don't think it ever acheived safe status.
For twenty five years my Dad constantly changed it. It never hit a point of completion on any of his incarnations, and at the point when I bought the property from my Parents last May, it was a pathetic mess. A combination of woodworking shop and greenhouse was the plan, but mostly it was just a used lumber storage box. The floor was now two feet above the foundation and hanging cantilevered three feet outside of the foundation, but only over half of the foundation, a quarter of the space was stacked lumber from ground level to roof. The remaining quarter of the space was just an open void that was planned to be all glass greenhouse.
So here you can see the building in the background before I touched it. Luckily the trees cover a lot of the uglyness. You can see it looks like a chunk of roof is simply missing, and the vertical and horizontal lines that somewhat look like windows from a distance, is actually racks of used lumber.
A view of the end of the building, there is no sheeting, in fact on this end it was downright scary with regards to the support posts, but thats irrelevant, it was stacked with scrap lumber so tight nothing was going to come down
So as it sat, it was a completely unuseable building for me. It was simply nothiing but scrap lumber storage, and under the floor which was now two feet above the foundation was a crawlspace used for storage, and it was packed full.
My plan started with gutting it out. I thought I could keep the existing walls. After hauling out ten truck loads of lumber, and then attempting to tear out the plywood rack and workbench, I found that the workbench and plywood rack were structural components
Final decision, keep the foundation and the roof, and build new in between. Bylaws say that my accessory building has to be under fifteen feet tall. A lot of measuring, head scratching, and drawing, and the building is fifteen feet tall, the bottom floor is sixteen inches below grade, and has an eight foot ceiling. The second floor has a low ceiling but its still comfortable enough with the floor to ridge beam height being 80" I get a space eight feet wide and eighteen feet long where the ceiling is higher than six feet. Oops thats a run-on sentence.
So it began. Supporting the roof was tricky. Actually it was beyond tricky, it sucked every which way you look at it. Sawzall and sledgehammer for demolition of the original building, and I only removed as much as I had to in order to keep the roof supported. I put posts in wherever I could whenever I could, moving them as I needed to.
Here it is at a point where the bottom floor walls are in and the floor joists are in. The roof is supported at this point by A-frame suports on the floor joists. Yeah the roof twisted a lot, it was heavy, and the overhangs used to be supported off the floor.
Working around a huge amount of scrap lumber still, Saturday is the only day I can get rid of scrap lumber, so its been a long process getting rid of 14 truck loads of scrap lumber so far.
Not a lot of pictures of the process, there are just some things you don't want to be reminded of sometimes. I almost feel bad about tearing out my Dads lifes work, but I'm sure that will pass when I finally get to roll my bike in and change the oil to get ready for the first ride of the season.
Today.
I started pouring the concrete floor Easter Sunday. When my Dad build it originally, the floor was 2x4 framed sitting on top of the footer, and about half of it was still the original, although rotted, I could have used it. The other half though was a mixed up combination of concrete slab in inexplicable shapes, and two foundation walls coming up six inches above floor level, plus some boxed in areas, again for enexplicable reasons. I considered just framing around things and building a wood floor at the highest level, but there was already twenty bags of cement and three yards of Navvy Jack in the yard.
After ripping out all the plywood and framing, I found a huge crater in the dirt underneath it. That solved my problem of the thousands of pounds of broken concrete in the yard from all the numerous other projects my Dad half built and then demolished. I couldn't bury it all in there, but I got rid of a good amount of it
I'm not real proud of the floor. Its got a high spot in the middle, its not real smooth, and since I couldn't do it all in one pour, it looks like a patchwork quilt. I'm happy its done.
A long way to go yet, but already the upstairs, even though there are no stairs yet, has become a storage area. Note the oil stain on my brand new plywood. I stepped on the bottle of air tool oil.
I picked up a 34" entry door for the ground level entry. The four foot wide opening will eventually get a small scale garage door. I have a 36" door for the upstairs entry, it will open outwards onto a landing, there are four steps inside the door opening to get upstairs. The door had to be lower than floor level due to the limited headroom, I couldn't have put a proper header over the door had I built it in higher.
The opening under the upstairs door opening will be a storage closet under the landing, accesible from inside. I figured that was wasted space anyway, might as well use it.
Obviously the bottom floor is 16" below the door opening, stairs are fine for people, what about getting bikes in and out? My motorcycle lift will act as an elevator
Next? I think finish the end walls on the top floor, then finish sheeting it, and tar paper while I try to figure out what to do for siding. Possibly cut the stair stringers and build the landing during the week too.
I'll update as things happen
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