New house and shop

[Roger Feeley]

Over the last year, my wife and I sold our house in Kansas City (Overland Park) and moved to Falls Church, VA to be with our daughter, her husband and our new grandson. We went for the grand social experiment and built a house on their property. Bear with me, I don't post pictures much. In the image below, you can see a circle drive bottom center, a garage to the right, the main house top center with a pool to its left. Our place is bottom left with a breezeway connecting our place to the main house.
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The plan for our house shows the main structure and a 12' x 24' porch facing the pool. Basically, we live in a pool house. The footprint of our house (minus the porch) is 976 sq feet. The basement extends under that porch so (here it comes), my shop is larger than the house at about 1300 square feet.

[Roger Feeley]

Basement Floor plan. Here you can see a number of features:
-- There are two staircases. There is an interior spiral staircase for people. There is an exterior stairwell for stuff. Yes, that's a 42" door.
-- There is groundwork for a full bath in the basement but it was not constructed. That is for some future owner. I cleverly covered the pipes with benches and such.
-- There is an egress in front facing the circle drive. The purpose for that is, again, for future resale. The basement could support two bedrooms and a full bath.

I had to make a couple of concessions.
- There are utilities (furnace, HW heater and such) in one corner.
- I had to give up about 6 feet of the space under the porch for general storage.

Other than that, it's all mine.

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[Roger Feeley]

My old basement got musty because it had no vents or returns. I saw an opportunity to do better. I had the HVAC guys put in two vents but no returns. Then, I sealed up the door to the interior stairwell really well. I had them frame an opening in the stairwell to fit a pleated furnace filter. The stairwell is my HVAC return and has it's own filter. I have heard no complaints.

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Those boards are temporary. I will build a nicer hinged frame one of these days.

[Peter Christensen]

Envious of your space of course. I think you should have done the bathroom even if only a toilet and sink so you can clean up before going upstairs. Also handy to have the water for sharpening, wetting wood to raise the grain and the like. How high is the ceiling?

[Roger Feeley]

What you see here (sideways???) is how I divide the electrical system between the amateur and the pro.

-- I installed a 80A breaker in the main box.
-- I ran wire from that to a service disconnect
-- From the service disconnect, I wired to my own breaker box.

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The builder put in some rudimentary lighting and outlets which I didn't touch. I have a little floodlight connected to builders lights that illuminates the breaker boxes. If I want to work on 'my' stuff, I turn on the builders lights. Turn off the service disconnect and do what I want. I know it's a bit of overkill but I like the extra layer of safety.

I had my last shop wired this way and electricians really appreciated that I drew such a hard line between their world and mine.

[Roger Feeley]

I made a conscious decision to minimize flat surfaces because I just trashed them up. I am also minimizing cabinets, opting for open shelving.

I wanted to be able to hang stuff everywhere. I took down just about all of the big sheets of insulation put in by the builder. I shot studs directly to the concrete walls and cut the sheets into bats. I put the insulation between the studs and then hung OSB everywhere. Now, if I want to hang something, I can drive a screw.

I was never a big fan of pegboard but wound up with a lot of it. Here's my tool wall.
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Remember that egress? The left half of the tool wall is on trolleys and opens like a barn door. I used an old garage door opener track and some skateboard bearings.
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Shelves to the left are for glues and stuff.

[Roger Feeley]

Although the long lumber comes in the front window, I chose to put the storage and cutoff by the back door. Hey, I'm retired and I need the exercise.
Not much out of the ordinary except.
-- I'm trying to reduce the amount of lumber I keep.
-- That's a home built flip stop system. I used 1/2"-20 all-thread and a Morton Quill Stop for fine adjustment. I've had that thing for over 10 years and the stop is still tight (no wiggles). I used a couple of nylon bushings from the hardware store.
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[Roger Feeley]

I didn't want to give up the space for a bath. This is northern Virginia in the DC area inside the beltway. Our house in Overland Park sold for about $280K. It would be a million and a half here. I would venture to say that we have one of the few unfinished basements in Falls Church. We are only 6 blocks from the DC Metro and land here is so expensive that these folks finish every square inch.

I have a nice SS utility sink.
Ceiling is nothing special. For occupancy, we have a good clear 8'.

Stay tuned.

[Roger Feeley]

Land here is incredibly expensive. Our kids lot is 7/8 acre and is valued at $900,000 for tax purposes. We are 6 blocks from the East Falls Church DC Metro Station.
Falls Church takes a dim view of 'Accessory Dwelling Units' because they don't want renters. All they have to work with is the blunt force tool of zoning rules. We could have built an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) which would be a detached building but we could not have had a fully functioning kitchen. That was a non-starter. We learned that if we connected to the main building in some way, then our building would be an addition and we could do whatever we wanted. Hence the breezeway.

We learned later that the definition of a fully functioning kitchen is a stove. So I joked that the breezeway was my $70,000 stove. Somehow the story got around the neighborhood that we had a $70,000 stove and when we had an open house more than a few people were disappointed.

We did look for our own house. The big problem was that I wanted an unfinished basement at those are just not to be had around here. Land is so incredibly expensive that everyone finishes every square inch. We gave up. This worked out for the best. We see our grandson every day.

I like to quip that our kids could do a lot worse for a nanny than a grandma with 30 years of education experience (19 as an elementary principal). Since they have a 160 year old farmhouse, it's also pretty handy to have a grandpa who's an ex Industrial Arts teacher and has a full shop.

[Roger Feeley]

This shot is pretty much from the door by the cutoff saw.
It seemed natural to have the surfacer, jointer and sander across from the cutoff saw.
You can also see the dust collector to the left.
It may look like these things get in the way of the table saw but they don't. That's a SawStop ICS (Christmas present from the bride of 40 years).
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[mark mcfarlane]

This looks awesome Roger. I wish my kids were closer, but I always thought a 1 hour drive was about the right distance :).

[Roger Feeley]

This is my main entrance. I come in the door, flip on the lights, grab my headphones and put on a shop vest. the brooms are there because sweeping up is generally the thing I do before I leave. If you look closely, you will see a cup holder above the light switch.

All the lights are the 4' LED units from Home Depot. 20 of those draw only about 700 watts so, for the first time, I can have the lights on a single circuit. The other switch is for the radio and air compressor. I wouldn't have done it but I got a bit of a windfall. About 10 years ago I did some programming for a guy for about 1/20th of what it was worth. He's pretty successful now and, from time to time, he sends me a check out of the blue. I view it as a gift so I feel obligated to turn it into something I can point to. This time, it was the lights and a Festool track saw.

Having that spiral staircase took a bite out of the space. The bandsaw and drill press seemed to work there. You can see the ambient air filter.
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[Roger Feeley]

This kind of proximity isn't for everyone and we approached the arrangement somewhat skeptically. We lived in the same house with our daughter and family for a year during construction and got along fine. Before that, we had some test runs where we stayed for a month at a time. I find that living 'across the parking lot' is about right.

-- The other day, Kristin (the daughter) called and said that a toilet was running. I popped over and fiddled with a gasket and had it going again in 10 minutes. If I had been an hour away, they probably would have called a plumber.
-- Our grandson is in the food throwing phase (18 months). The parents call over and ask for 'cleanup'. We give our dogs the cleanup command and they go to our back door. Kristin appears at their back door and says, "Cleanup". The dogs scamper to the other house and gobble up whatever the kid threw. Then they are instructed to 'Go Home' and they scamper back. Very handy and the dogs love it!

[Roger Feeley]

That's kind of a special place. For one thing, the ceiling is lower which I didn't expect. Maybe I wasn't listening...
This will be a great place to hide out from a hurricane in that there is concrete on 5 sides.

At some point, when I am too old and infirm to have a shop, I figure our grandson will have a band. This would make a great rehearsal space. We can turn down our hearing aides and they can rage against the machine all they want.

Because of the low ceiling, I tried to select things that didn't need a lot of overhead room. The two lathes and some grinders seemed perfect.

We put up plywood on the ceiling (drywall lifts are awesome!) to help with dust from the wood lathe. We painted the plywood ceiling to brighten up the space.
The photos are from left to right.

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[Roger Feeley]

Where we built:

If it weren't for the family aspect, the DC area wouldn't be on my list at all. I don't particularly like the climate here and things are really expensive. I do like the East Coast. There is so much to see and a lot of is so close compared to where I used to live. I joke that my 1300 sq foot basement was a compromise. If we built elsewhere, I probably could have had a 40'x100' Butler Building and I would be building a boat, refitting a school bus or building a hovercraft. Big projects like that are off the table but that's ok.

Builder:
We used a company named Winn Design and Build here in Falls Church and I have nothing but good things to say about them. I have no doubts that we could have gotten the work done cheaper but you get what you pay for and I have to say that everything got done on time and on budget.

When we signed the contract in April of '16, Winn estimated occupancy in 'Mid December'. We moved on December 19th. Winn accounted for the 4 days (inspector went on vacation towards the last) discrepancy and apologized. I was impressed.

Living in the main house, I was on-site every day and watched the work and chatted with the workers from time to time. The subcontractors all had pretty much the same thing to say about Winn. The framers said, "We like working with Winn because we know that the foundation will be nice and level and we won't have to correct mistakes." The sheet rock guys said, "We like working with Winn because we know that the framing will be right and we wont have to correct for curved studs or out-of-square framing." All the subs took enormous pride in their work.

The only down side of having a house 'done right' is that I can't use all those clever insults I've built up over the years.

My shop:

In retrospect, I was incredibly lucky to get what I got. There was no reason to build under that porch other than I wanted the space. I don't know what we paid for that and I'm sure I want to know.
If I were to do anything differently and I had the money, I would have had them dig out the basement a bit deeper. But that's pretty much it. A lot of the shape of the shop is driven by what's going on upstairs. The position of the spiral staircase might not be the best for me but there was no alternative. An upside is that, if we ever need it, the spiral staircase could be removed and we could have an elevator.