If you have followed me, you know that I have built surfboards in my kitchen, kayaks on my porch, and at times set up the saw in my bedroom. Well folks, things just got real. I now have almost 3600 sft to play in. A few buddies and I decided to pool our money and tools and go in on three adjoining bays, each being 20x60’. We are sharing everything, and it’s perfect. When we combine our big equipment, we have almost the perfect setup: 12” jointer, 15” planer, 10” Unisaw, two Rikon bandsaws, three drill presses (one huge, one large dedicated to mortising, and one tiny benchtop) edge sander, thickness sander.... and so on. We are taking over a former cabinet shop. It started out as one bay, and we asked the landlord for a deal on two bays, and today we agreed to make it three, since the three are already joined and so we don’t need to wall off to make two.
The downside is this guy fed stray cats inside the shop and kept the windows open so they could come and go. It was absolutely filthy and disgusting. When we pressure washed the thing, I had to wear a full face respirator mask. In addition to the cat pee and poop, there were roaches galore. We decided to nearly gut the place. The walls were full of roach poop. It was awful. We sprayed, we bleached, we sprayed, and we bleached. I scraped and swept and vacuumed every inch of the floors and painted them, and blew out all the rafters with a powerful leaf blower.
The original shop had a 15x18 finish room that had apparently never been cleaned in 15 years. There are no words. I wanted to keep it, but we decided to rip it out and downsize it to 10x20, as the support beams are 20’ OC with a smaller beam at 10’.
Before pics:
looking west- to left is a roughly 15x15 room with entry door, then a roughly 15x18 open area, then a 15x18 spray room. That part of the building is notched so it’s not quite 60’ deep. Forward of that is a 20x60 open area.
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Looking north, spray room is in the back left corner. To the right is another bay20x40’. We weren’t originally going to use that bay, and were going to wall it off. That changed today after talking to the landlord. I think when he saw us painting and cleaning he liked us more. The edge banner and Steel City bandsaw are not staying.
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I don’t have a pic of the other bay except I took one of the cabinet saw and you can see the bay in the background.
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All Ll lighting is LED, which saves a ton of money here where power is $0.52/kWh after they add fuel surcharges and other add-on fees.
The spray room had an old exhaust fan that was so covered in overspray that you had to turn it on and then help it by spinning it. It’s in the trash now.
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Cat feeding station. Double glass doors behind that open to spray room.
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Will post a reply with updated pics below- there is a limit to pics per post.
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Originally Posted by Steve Fish
