New Acreage.... What size shop?
 

Finally found a piece of property and have a contract, (closing later this month) on a nice piece of property after looking for-EVER...
7 Acres - 25 minute drive from the intl airport- 12 year old SOLID Barn... Creek... spring... 250 foot well... granite outcroppings... 10 miles from I85 little north of the midpoint between Atlanta and Charlotte.
Now comes a building... and spray booth.

200 sq ft per car. Count up all your cars ,multiply by 2, add car wash bay,work bay, paint booth,clean room then add another 2000 sq ft and you are close.

Very pretty piece of ground. Congrats! Always exciting planning the possibilities and new horizons. Shop size? I worked in a large machine tool factory, up here, in Cincinnati. Standing at one end, you literally could not see the other end of the building with the naked eye! It was huge! THAT is the size building one needs, IMO. It’s never big enough.

Wow! Awesome find and congratulations! You've gotta be excited for sure!!:drool:

What I did for my shop was divide the buildings. Yes, I'd loooooove a shop that was visible from Alpha Centauri, but when I walk out my door, I didn't want to see the Empire State building. What I did was to build two buildings: one 1200 sq. Ft., and another 900 sq. Ft. In addition, an oversized 1000 sq ft 3-car garage on the house. The main big shop will be divided into a paint booth with parts mezzanine on top, a 2 post lift in one space, and a clear bay on the other. The other building will be the MCACN shrine...er....the reassembly and clean room for newly painted cars! :smile: Basically, one dirty shop, one clean shop followed by car storage at the house if needed.:biggthumpup:

Obviously, this works for me and not most. Mainly because I sell all my cars when done anyway so car storage, while needed, isn't the main concern. My main concern is keeping newly painted cars away from all the dirty crap! This decision for me comes from years of having different shops and what worked and didn't. What I found myself doing was always dividing bigger buildings into smaller ones to separate stages in my build process so one doesn't muff-up the other. I can handle that part! :frown: So that's why I decided to do smaller shops. Well...I guess smaller is a relative term. They are also located across from each other for ease of transfer between the buildings. :smile:

Just another suggestion for you to consider besides the bigger building concept. Keep us posted...and nicely done!!

Cheers:beers:
Dave

Bentley... too big is never big enough. I looked at 125,000 ft building a few years ago and thought... I can only spot 8 rail cars, and the drive way is just over 1/4 miles straight... ... not big enough & not a long enough drive for SHUTDOWN area.... LOL

Dave,
How tall are you to the eves on your building and what is the height for your mezzanine? We had a nice mezzanine in our Paper Converting Plant BUT had 21 foot eves on the building.
I was also considering breaking it up so that I didn't have paint/body work and assembly going on in the same building. I too have dealt with the irritation of having a complete mess all over cars being assembled AND have been using a paint booth to put a car together which means I have primed a bunch of parts outside or in the shop for the last 6 months.

The eave height on my building is 14ft, and the peak is 18ft, so the mezzanine will have a sloped ceiling peak, but for what I'm doing with it as far as storage, it'll work out fine. Paint booth won't be more than 9ft high, so a car on a twirler can rotate a good distance to get on the underside of the body. Worked in my last shop and I was pretty pleased with the 2,500,000 Lumens of LED lighting I had in there. Turn those on and it was like an X-Ray machine went off! I looked like a walking skeleton! :eek2::smile:

Cheers
Dave

That is a pretty piece of property! Congrats! Have fun! Keep us posted!

I have 6 cars right now. I just built a new shop last year. Mine is 60 x 72 with 2 18 foot overhead doors on it and a man door across the 60 foot side. That left me plenty of room for workbenchs and cabinets. I have an area with a 4 post lift. I did a full bath with walk in shower, compressor/utility room and a storage room thats 12 x 30. I did 12 foot ceilings which works great for the lift.
You have the room, go for it!! :D

Mine is 26-30’ x 70’. Two barns put together. Ceiling is 16’ and drops to 10’. I have 1 14’ door, 1 10’ 2 car and 2 10’ 2 car doors. I have 5 cars and a few bikes and always looking for more!
6” concrete with 1” foam and plastic underneath.
No lift yet, doing the research via GJ. They have a lot of ways to spend money over there, heck it’s as bad as this place!
Happy to give my pros and cons on barns if you ever have questions.
Have fun with it!

I would also recommend more than one building.

Keep lawn equipment in one building; that way you are not tracking lawn clippings and leaves into a clean work or storage space.

One area partitioned off for dirty work: welding, grinding, blasting. A separate area for storage and display.

Make the ceiling high enough for a hoist and make the entry high enough to allow an enclosed car trailer or RV (if you have one or ever might entertain the possibility of maybe getting one).

K

Keith... Thanks for the HEADS UP about the enclosed trailer, hadn't thought about that.

Yes, trailer storage is important too.

I laid out my storage garage with a 12'x12' door on the short side so as to park the truck and trailer along the back long wall with room enough to drop the trailer gate. Front side long wall has three 18' doors to allow any car to back out and go. 14' ceiling allows lifts to stack cars. "attic trusses" allow for parts storage room upstairs, accessed by staircase and a hoist on a jib through a scuttle hole for heavy stuff.

Attached to the house, the 28x30 shop ajoins the driver garage and then extends to a "dirty room" with parts washer, blast cabinet vac, a small paint booth and the compressor. On the frontside of this also ajoining the shop is a garage for the tractor, ATV, fork lift, engine lift, and the blast cabinet which is connected to the vac through the wall. 2" foam under the concrete which is 8" thick in lift mount areas and radiant water heat. You will want floor drains also.

That's beautiful property and it's satisfying to have a plan come together with everything at home, I was exactly where you are three and a half years ago. Hire contractors based on quality rather than price and good luck!

Bill W

RE : Trailer. Build it such that you can pull the trailer all the way through, so you go in one door and out the other. You don’t want to have to back trailers up if you can avoid it. And make that pull through area wide enough that after a long trip or inclimate weather, you can pull the whole trailer and truck inside and shut the door. And the door high enough that a rollback can haul something through the door.
RE: Ceiling. Make the eave higher than 12’. You may want to make a loft and you will be ducking rafters if you only have 12’ and are of average height. A minimum of 14’ to the eave. Keep the building clear span. If you do make a loft and you plan on putting vehicles under the loft floor area, then you will want an engineered clear span floor truss, so no supporting poles are in the way. If you have no plans for a loft, consider having roof trusses made that have the center of the span open. With this approach you would want the doors on each end in the center of the gable. You could build a much shorter side wall and gain several feet of clearance in the center with this type truss.
A building within a building. Large buildings are hard to heat and cool. If the majority of the building will be used to store “stuff”, consider walking off an actual work space that is manageable to heat and cool or like having a smaller building within a building.
Read Garage Journal.com thoroughly and and there are some farm magazines that put out the best workshop ideas in a once a year publication. There are a lot of great idas. One I liked is putting concealed anchors in the floor. You take a small (4x4 or 6x6”) lid off and there is a stout “D” ring or eye bolt. You have to have this really secure to steel before pouring slab. That way if you want to straighter something, like a bumper, you can chain it to the floor and secure it to pry or jack something back to shape. Acts like a frame rack.

James, when I built my shop 20 years ago I was limited to a 30'X40'. More space would've been nice but instead I learned better space management skills.
I made a rule to not store parts, engines, trans, or anything unrelated to current work in my shop. You and everyone likely already know this but its my way of taking the side of suggesting separate building(s) or rooms for parts/equipment storage.
Also, FWIW, I'll suggest using in-ground lifts, if they suit your type of work. I installed one simply because I didn't want those awful posts to work around in my limited space. I use above-ground everyday at work and they're fine but the in-ground at home drastically changes the atmosphere in the shop.

Radiant floor heat! Though, I guess it doesn't get THAT cold there in SC.

I am planning on doing waste oil or wood pellet boiler for floor heat -mainly to keep condensation off the cars in the winter -- much of the time it is cold wet and not freezing... which causes condensation on the bottoms of cars.
Plus heated floors gives me one less excuse to avoid the shop. Actually if my feet stay warm I can work 10 hours. I have a high arched foot which makes the top of my foot higher and the laces on shoes restrict the circulation and my toes can get cold quickly.
Until I got custom Lange Ski Boots for snow skiing and Double high wrap plates on my water-ski I couldn't snow ski for more than an hour at a time max, by the time getting off the gondola my toes would be cold.... with waterskiing now days I can only go for maybe 20 min making hard cuts and jumping the wake before throwing the rope... lol been waterskiing for 40 years.

Bentley - I am planning an airlock which a car can drive into without losing my A/C - Heat, however the building within a building is a great idea - how our plant was constructed. 9,000 office inside of a 75k building -

My only advice would be to not build something so big that you won't get your money out of property if you ever have to sell.

I had that two houses ago.

It was wonderful.

Front barn was a 30'x50' former horse barn, with stalls and such.

The back barn was the finished off "race shop" (20'x40').

K

Don't forget about the outside. Build a garage that is aethestically pleasing and fits the acreage and neighborhood. If you ever have to sell it will pay off. Too big of a building or boring square box can look awful. Build something with class.

A guy in my area built a shop that is twice as tall and probably 3 times the size of his house and has 3 huge garage doors out front and it looks hideous. He built it 50 feet from his house.

Like I said hideous looking. His wife has to be ticked.

Morton and similar companies have great looking garage plans.

X2 on Morton. Built one this year I’ll try posting a pic

He needs to hurry up. I got some more cars to store!!! The Z is coming to my house!!

I went with a 30 x 51 ALL Steel Clear span building just shy of 15' at the centerline 3 - 10' x 10' Drum Doors. I put a deposit on the building and am in the contractor's schedule to begin the first week of April...
I am going with to lay in a 2" foam barrier and then pipe it in PEX for floor heat then pour a 6" floor.
Gray with Cobalt Blue trim.
Grading contractor will be there next week...
General construction type the first photo and the color scheme is the second.

That's going to be a great shop. I'm in the process of deciding what I'm going to build at our new place. They want an insane $150k for the unfinished gambrel 50x60 that I want, so I'm either going to build myself or end up with a metal building. I'm leaning towards building it myself. Wood is crazy expensive right now though so I don't know... It's killing me not having a shop!

I will end up doubling if not larger,
I have an acre of planted hybrid spruce at the front corner, I can push down an area in there and use the other trees as a perfect buffer between the house and the shop.

I was surprised at the pricing - 26-27k erected. not incl concrete.

Neighbor said I have 5-7 deer grazing behind the barn and into the creek every evening. I may hide out in the barn with the camera one evening soon.

Just get some Arlo Camera's and set them out there.

Can't hate that. Both the price and the deer. It's really pushing me towards a metal building. Unfortunately the guys around my new house use dogs to "hunt deer" and still call themselves hunters. Even though I have ten acres, it ruined the real hunting and just the enjoyment of watching deer on my property.

Don’t worry I got my bro covered with a cuddeback game camera. Now he just needs to let me hunt out there.

Grading Contractor has been busy... there were about 200 Spruce Trees taken down and mulched...
Building doors will be facing the bulldozer, rows of Spruces as a break between the road with the building being set about 100 feet off the road.

It's only money, besides the last I checked they were printing it with WRECKLESS ABANDON... :grin:

Trying to get everything for the pad to be poured in the next couple weeks and running crazy getting ready for the NCRS show in Cinci 2nd week of April.

Not sure what you’re planning to do with the floor as far as coding but I had my concrete died black and when I finished it with a clear Apoxsee it came out like us gray-ish black-ish swirl stain almost. I was a little nervous going in because when they poured it it was black but it really came out cool and I can send pictures if you’d like

With a dark floor you will need more lighting versus a lighter colored floor. Huge difference.

I went with 60x80 steel structure...wanted open ceiling for hanging signs (ceiling is brown)...for flooring I went with pigmented concrete a reddish brown color called Rawhide, was less expensive than an epoxy floor and never really have to worry about if it starts chipping/flaking...walls are tan.
All depends on the look/function you're going for.

Ha... was discussing this TODAY... lol
I am doing white or very light gray epoxy floors... this has been on my list for years.
I want to be able to see things if they fall on the floor + it is SO much brighter in the garage and under the cars, white floors reflect the overhead light up under the cars.
When planning I thought about The shops I have most enjoyed working in - they all have had white/very light grey/very light blue - epoxy floors... engine assembly rooms, labs, and highly prepared race car shops.
NO FLECKS...
If you etch a new floor with muriatic acid prior to coating it and YOU ADHERE TO THE INSTRUCTIONS you are VERY unlikely to have a problem.


PAD poured today - the building was delivered last week....
Monolithic pad 35 yards 4000# concrete with fiber 51x30 18" footers with Rebar,
1" Extruded polystyrene below grade foam insulation under the pad and footers surround etc, with 6 mil plastic.

Atta boy!

Steel started going up today... WON'T BE LONG!

What up, my concrete brotha from another motha!?!?:laugh:

I’m right there with ya! Awesome!

Cheers
Dave

So Dave, where do I continue to follow the build...landhooooo or here? I have been in withdrawn and missing updates

Quik9r

Ha! Well, “Laaaaand Ho” I basically wrapped up with the barn build, but fear not, Quick! :wink:Right below this thread is “New Shop size, considerations, thoughts...” That I started. You can follow shop updates there. For some reason the first page of the thread was deleted and it shows that Postsedan started the thread.:hmmm:

Cheers:beers:
Dave

Building was completed 2 weeks ago I have been so busy I just got by the place today.

Looks great! You will be surprised how fast it fills up

Wow, that went up fast and blends in nicely with the surroundings. Do you mind sharing costs by major category? Site prep, concrete slab, steel building, electrical, hvac, etc. Also, what thickness did you use on the concrete slab?