Carving out a shop

[Thjoth]

My family has always lived on the same farm, but we finally moved for the first time ever to another farm. This shop building is on the one we lived on up until a year ago or so. The shop belonged to my uncle, but when he got his own farm and moved all of his stuff over there, it fell into disrepair in a big way. It's been completely abandoned for about a decade now, maybe a little longer. The calendar on the wall is still on August of 1987, but I know it hasn't been that long as I wasn't born until August of '88 and I remember them working up there. The building is still fine structurally, but it has several problems that will be pretty obvious from the "before" photos that I have for you all here. A couple of my friends have been helping me clear it out, so far we've only worked on it for one weekend, though. Repaid one friend in pizza, will repay the other in beer. I shudder to think of reaching an age where I can't repay favors with food and beer. To be fair, we mostly drink craft beer so I suppose it's a bit pricier beer than normal, at least.

If you see anything that you want to make a suggestion on, go ahead. This is very much a work in progress and anything you guys could mention that I haven't noticed could save me some work, now or later.



Now, I've got this about 80% cleaned up but I forgot to take pictures as the process was ongoing (well, the interior was a lot worse, I forgot to take a "before" picture so that's more of an "in the middle" picture). I'll have to take some "in progress" pictures later tonight or tomorrow.

The main problems (that I can and plan to fix) that this building still has are as follows:

1) The Amazing Disintegrating Door (Seriously, I have no idea how it's still together)
2) The collapsing interior ceiling (fiberglass insulation, started coming down when raccoons got into it. Little bastards.)
3) Electricity got knocked out at some point
4) Needs new planks to cover MASSIVE PIT in the floor as my friend stepped on one and fell through. Bruised his knee, hip, ass, and pride. Mostly his pride.
5) Drainage due to sloped floor

The problems that it has that I can't fix are as follows:

1) Sloped floor (would really prefer it to be level)
2) MASSIVE PIT to get under vehicles right in the middle of said floor
3) No electricity (the line is underground, not sure if I can fix it or not, so I have it on both lists)

What I've done so far:

1) Moved the old tractor/riding mower and bunton-style lawnmower (had to tow the tractor with a truck)
2) Chopped down the two trees growing up through the door (honeysuckle and something-berry, I think Dad said it was elderberry)
3) Pruned the other trees back out of the way. Leaving them because anything that shades that tin roof is welcome.
4) Cleaned massive amount of refuse and what is effectively compost from said trees off of concrete pad outside (1 55gal drum and half a truckload)
5) Removed all trash except for about 10% in one corner (3 truckloads)
6) Separated out all the scrap steel from everything else
7) Cleaned off the bench (probably needs new planking for the bench top)

Still to do (that isn't already on the "I can fix it!" list):

1) Tear down the ceiling. No idea what (if anything) I'm going to replace it with.
2) New door. Garage doors are expensive, might wind up building a door just like the one that's on it now out of new oak boards.
3) Drainage. This thing has no gutters, and thanks to the sloped floor, water runs to the back of the shop and stays there.
4) Ventilation. For obvious reasons.

Buried Treasure found so far:

1) 18" section of railroad track
2) About 50lbs of spring steel (in the form of medium sized coil springs mostly, some leaf springs)
3) About 150lbs of scrap steel of various unknown types. I'll figure out if it's actually usable later. Some plate that's 1/4" or thicker
4) Incredibly old table saw type of thing (visible on the right in the interior picture)
5) 1 ball pein head
6) 1 cross pein sledge head
7) 2 massive chisels (one is about a foot long)
8) Model 1816 bayonet for Springfield .67 caliber rifle used in US Civil War (random find of the week, rest of the gun was unfortunately nowhere to be found)

So, this is what I'm doing and have gotten done in the pursuit of a shop space apart from my father's, which gets ridiculously packed with stuff. I figured I would post it on here in case anybody had suggestions or comments on it. It'll also work to keep me honest and working on it instead of having my attention drift elsewhere and it never getting done.

[ThomasPowers]

ROOF first thing! Once your roof will keep water out the rest can be worked on.

Why are garage doors expensive? I've seen them given away on craigslist fairly regularly. I bought two roll up doors for $75 a piece, used of course.

If you can't fill in the hole frame it in and put a good floor over it. Might make a good beer cooler for beers that should be drunk at english cellar temps.

Give some though to covering the walls with sheet metal. Got any friends in HVAC? A crazy quilt design will work.

Can you put in a french drain system to keep outside water from coming in?

[Marksnagel]

Sounds like you have a good start. You have identified the problem areas. Like they said in the movie "Money Pit", If you have a good foundation you can rebuild.

Well even if you don't have a good foundation, at least you have a shell to start with. Good luck. Look under the broken floor boards, you might find more goodies.

Like Thomas said, ROOF first thing. As an outdoorsman I understand that in survival, shelter from the elements comes first. Take your time, be safe, and enjoy the ride.

Mark<><

[Thjoth]

As far as I know, the roof keeps water out as it is. I won't know for sure until what's left of that insulation comes down. The whole building has sheet metal around the outside and it's pretty water tight. Where water gets in is at the large sliding door at the front. For some reason I can't fathom, my uncle (I assume he's the one that built the thing...Dad seems to think it was him, anyway) decided to have a very slightly sloping concrete pad on the outside that slopes towards the door. Once you're on the inside, the floor continues sloping the SAME DIRECTION (c'mon man, did you really build this with the expectation that the door would keep all the water out?) all the way to the back, where it levels off for the last 6 feet or so. The door rides in a groove in the concrete that's around 6" deep, so it takes a good rain to start flooding the place, but once it gets over that little groove it's all downhill from there.

Come to think of it, is 6"x4" DepthxWidth enough to get a French drain system in? I think it should be... If so, once I've replaced that door, I could stick the drain right in that groove and it would solve that particular problem quite handily. The groove is already KIND OF acting as a drain as it is, but it was just meant to be a track for the door to ride in. The fact that a tree grew up in the middle of it doesn't help it for either function....I need to get that stump out somehow...

As for the garage doors, I never thought to look on craigslist or for used ones. I need to measure that door to see what size I need, but I just sort of assumed that I would need to have a door made specifically for that gap. They seem to want to charge at least $2000 for a new one, though, which seems a little crazy to me.

I really like that beer cellar idea I need someplace to age my ales that need a little time on them, after all...

We pulled up the rest of the boards that went across that pit as soon as my friend fell through, and there wasn't anything cool under there, unfortunately. Just some milk crates and a layer of grime that had washed in on one of the tides coming from the door.

[NotVeryGood]

Hello,

Sounds like a good shop so far!

Water issues: If it were my project, I would form it out, bring in a concrete truck, and reverse the slope. I would make it go downwards torwards the door. You can then chose what to do with the mini-wine cellar at the same time. Would cost less than $500 and would be a permanent repair. My shop (not built by me) has puddles form in it, every spring, on gravel (because of frozen ground). I just built a raised planked floor over it, on half the shop.

For a Door: Would build one with plenty of cross bracing to keep it stiff, using reclaimed lumber. Just personal preference of look for me.

Electricity: Could be broken somewhere underground, but I would bet something is not right at either end of the line. Fuse box? issues, the wires could be disconnected, etc...

Just thoughts...

[Drewed]

Cheap vinyl gutters and downspout extensions may go a long way to keeping a lot of the water out of the shop.
Unless somebody cut the wire while digging, it is unlikely that it is broke under ground.

If the roof is sound, you could put drywall up to hold up the insulation, but that may not look right. Nah, never mind, that would look all wrong in that building. I'd tear out the insulation and be done.

[pkrankow]

The pit is the easy part. You build a new trap door. Having access to a maintenance pit is really nice sometimes.

The ceiling and insulation is a mess. Wear breathing protection, who knows what you may find...

The door can be rebuilt with plywood or what-have-you or you can look for decent used doors.

Electric is probably direct bury. Find both ends, disconnect both ends, jumper one end together and test the other end. If you get very low resistance across all the wires then the buried wire is *probably* OK and the problem is at one or both panels. This will take you very little time and you need to do it anyways. Do not energize the circuit unless you are confident that nothing is getting electrocuted.

Drainage runoff is best handled by stopping the water outside and directing it elsewhere. Some French drains, roof gutters, and a berm on the high side will do it. Build a floor in the areas you need level, terrace the dirt floor if you need, don't get too hung up on perfectly level though.

Phil

edit:nGround and buried are different things.

[ThomasPowers]

Common folks this is *country*! The electricity could be *anything* down under ground including spliced in the middle with a piece of baling wire or barbwire! Could be 6-0 or lamp cord. Don't bet your life an the other fellow's work!

I'd do a through check out of it both in dry and wet weather! You probably want a bigger drop anyway so you can get a crackerbox to build tooling with.

If you have some money to work on it and you are near a town I'd contact a small company that does garage door replacements and see how much a pull-off was.

I prefer roll up doors or barn doors as they don't mess with the overhead in your shop and I've always considered any shop with less than 20' free and clear at the side wall to be a bit tight on overhead space---mine's about 10'; but we almost got the place with 20' shop walls; sigh.

One other handy shop item---you may want to build a privy if the shop is a good distance from facilities you can use. If you do it up fancy you get a great place to show off your hand forged ironwork too---door latch, hinges, TP holder, candle holder, bud vase, magazine rack...

[Thjoth]

OK, so here are some updated pictures.



I have to say it looks a lot better on the outside...you can also see how much water gets into the place, although this is a bit less than usual for some reason, especially considering the torrential rainfall we've had for the last two days. I also took a picture down in the pit (third) so you can see that now.

I'm not too far out of town at this location. Within a 5 minute drive, you're in a subdivision. The city sort of expanded around us. However, knowing the...dubious construction methods of practically everyone in my family (on that side, anyway), the line might very well be lamp cord patched with bailing wire running through a garden hose conduit. I would be a little surprised if it wasn't. As I've discovered more and more hack-job "fixes" that they've made over the years (a broken beam in a barn that was wired together as if it helped being one of the bigger WTF moments), my faith in their ability to repair things has declined.

I also have a good idea of where the electricity comes from, but I'm an idiot and didn't take a picture while I was out there. There's another building that sits right under the electric pole that feeds the back part of the property. I'm fairly sure the electric comes off the pole, runs through that building and into the ground, and then crosses over to the shop. I can't actually get to the pole to see if anything runs directly off the pole or not due to nature running wild (copperheads are coming out, and that undergrowth is thick enough to repel a concentrated flamethrower attack). There IS a 220v outlet in the shop that used to power a welder (one of the stick types), so it MAY have run directly off the pole.

Now for the bad part of that if I'm right about the building...that building is in way worse shape than the shop is. It's amazing how a year of neglect gives nature a toehold to take down half the stuff you've built. Anyway, the building that the electric routes through effectively has no roof left, which is why (I assume) the power has grounded out and cut off in the shop. I could very well be wrong about that, though. I might try to bribe my friend's dad into taking a look at it, he's been a licensed electrician for the last 25 years so he'd know what's going on. I'm a little leery of touching it, myself. I've very briefly crossed a 120v line before and that isn't an experience I'd like to repeat.

[ThomasPowers]

I've used worse---a broken down chicken coop with a thin concrete wash floor broken apart by active groundhog dins and no chance of electricity for one...(used my small cannon to deal with the 'hog problem...)

Get it dry; perhaps some windows to provide ventilation/light. The rolling chain hoist is a real nice thing to have! Clear all the trash around it and elevate any trees---cut off the low branches to get some air around the place but still have shade from higher up---makes it less homelike for the slithery folk. (I don't have copperheads; we tend more toward rattlesnakes out here and they like scrap piles even scrap metal piles!)

Personally I'd probably yank all the ceiling and insulation out. Nice to have when working on a car in winter; but not so necessary for smithing *ESPECIALLY* if you ever get a propane forge which is really just a gussied up salamander heater... I used to live in the AR Ozarks and never used heat even in the winter in the shop beyond what a small home built wood stove provided.

[nhblacksmith]

A few thoughts...For the door, you might consider leaving the large sliding door on barn door track. It would be easy to fabricate a new one, relatively tight if done right, and doesn't take up any interior or overhead space like overhead garage door track. Garage doors when they are up will collect lots of dust and dirt in a shop. I've had a 10' x 10' sliding door on my shop since new about 20 years ago and it has held up fine.

As far as the pit goes, I have had two pits in past buildings and while they are great for working on vehicles, they are extremely dangerous. An uncle of mine was a mechanic in WWII and told of knowing of three separate incidents where guys blew themselves up from gasoline fumes and either a cigarette or a drop light. Most insurance companies will decline coverage these days if you have one. If left open, they are like pit traps for a bear especially when you come in from the bright sun and forget the covers are off. Remember too that propane is heavier than air and any leaks are likely to settle into the bottom of your pit where they will remain for a long time or until ignited by a stray spark from a forge weld.

Concrete is expensive these days but many years ago we had to fill in an area inside a building and had a concrete company deliver gravel instead. They used the chutes to place it and there was relatively little leveling when they finished. That would fill in the pit and level up the floor to use as is or pour a new layer of concrete over the top. If the pit comes in the right area and you decide to fill it, think about setting a large timber on end to mount your anvil and maybe a pipe to mount a vice. I have an 8 foot 12" x 16" Rock Maple timber that goes down 5' below the floor and the anvil is rock solid. I also used a piece of 6" pipe fabricated for a post vice that also extends 5' below the floor.

For electricity, it doesn't pay to skimp on code. You might think about burying some 4" PVC through which you can pull new wires. If you lay a smaller pipe a couple feet over, you can run a phone line out as well. In general that building should work out fine. Good luck with the project