After retirement I moved back to my childhood home of Selah to be near my widowed Mom and Grandma, as well as my sister and her family who lived nearby. While I was out of the country, a friend who knows everyone excitedly contacted me with some great news – his real estate agent buddy had a short sale on a property just outside the city limits of Selah with a great shop. And oh, by the way, it also has a little house! Well now, what could be better, a place of my own (I’d never owned a house before) with a shop bigger than the house, which would be perfect for a single guy just starting to think about getting some cars! Before you know it, the 30*30 shop is full and I’m renting space at a nearby storage facility. Not gonna work! After some false starts drawing up plans for a shop expansion it became clear that I simply needed more space for the ever-growing herd. Let the search begin!
After searching high and low from the Wenas to West Valley and all points in between and around, I found a 2-acre property in Gleed with a 30 x 36 shop and plenty of room to grow. The house was basically a “gut it and start over” prospect, built in 1984 and never updated, and lived in by the kids of a guy who’d been relocated. Looked like no maintenance had been done on the house, shop, yard, etc. for years as it was all overgrown with weeds, with dead trees, broken sprinkler lines and junk strewn everywhere, but hey, who doesn’t like a project? At some point the house will be the topic of another section, so we’ll just stick to the shops for now.
As one can imagine, that 30 x 36 shop filled up pretty quickly. The house itself had a single-car garage on the first level and another in the basement, so I did some repurposing and added two more garage doors to the lower basement level. Yep, that all filled up, too. I was between house remodel and playing with my new toys (the cars) when in early 2019 my then-GF moved from Peru to Gleed, which resulted in many changes in priorities, but I always had my heart set on a new shop.
After going around in circles with my own design, permitting, easements, septic drain fields, access, the neighbor’s huge cottonwood trees, I pulled the trigger on a pole barn contract. Then I got married. Then COVID hit. Then the fun started.
My plan was to have the pole barn built, floor poured, mezzanine structure roughed in and just the basic plumbing and electrical work done to get signed off by the inspector, then finish it up the plumbing, electrical, insulation construction work on my own. Luckily that all got contracted at pre-Covid pricing, along with most of the materials I was going to need to finish things up. Also luckily, the construction area was tucked in behind the house and hidden from view, so the contractors, for the most part, continued to work through Covid, though I did need to find a different plumbing contractor. That whole adventure is another story that gets its own tab – let’s start with the “old shop”.
OLD SHOP
The house I bought in 2018 was advertised as having a 30×50 shop, but it turned out to be actually 30×36. I bought the house anyway, figuring 30×36 was HUGE, especially since I had added garage space into the basement of the house. Well, we all know how that was going to end, don’t we? I actually managed to cram quite a few cars in, but quickly realized that cramming cars into a garage and being able to work on cars were kinda conflicting goals, especially once I installed the 4 post lift. Didn’t take long to figure out I needed more space, which is where the new shop comes in. My grand plan was to set up the new shop for storage and the old shop to put into practice my new-found and rapidly growing mechanical skills and combine them with my endless supply of dreaming and wasting money. So, let’s set up a backyard mechanics dream shop!
Of course that means getting all the yardwork stuff out, so I took mostly leftover materials from the new shop and built a 14’ extension to store the lawnmower, shovels, sprayers and everything else that didn’t have a good place to live – and more than once, car parts and project overflow! Also, to keep the noise down, I moved the air compressor and spare tank out there, though via a hose I can tie into my sprinkler manifold and blow out the entire 2 acres from the comfort of my shop (engineering at its finest!).
Next was to get heat installed; phase one was a portable diesel/kerosene heater in the winter and swamp cooler in the summer, followed by more insulation, a ceiling-mount propane heater and a big ceiling fan. Final phase was to just spend the money and install a mini-split inverter heat pump from Mr. Cool and install it myself – heat in the winter, A/C in the summer, efficient and not overly expensive – looking into that for the other shop now.
As a concurrent project with the new shop build, I had a couple of 3’x3’ squares cut out of the floor slab, dug some 2’ deep holes, reinforced it with rebar in the hole and tiebacks to the original slab and poured footers for a 2 post lift. Of a few under-slab conduits were sacrificed in the process, leading to some more electrical work, so as usual one little project leads to many others. The shop was supposed to be “prepped for a bathroom”, which I originally reckoned would mean to just install a toilet and a sink and get after it, but nope… that nomenclature apparently meant they simply didn’t pour concrete in the back corner. Great… so another project digging in a small septic system out back, installing plumbing and having the slab section poured in the corner while they were out doing the cement work on the other shop. Sink from the ReStore, left over flooring from a house bathroom project, spare old toilet I pulled from the house, used 2×4’s from a lean-to demo, old free pallet wood for the wall coverings inside and out, mirror pulled from an old bathroom and a bunch of leftover electrical stuff from other projects and Bob’s your uncle – free bathroom and no need to go to the house to “do the business”. Oh, and a small water heater, so I guess it wasn’t quite free. Plumbed water to both shops from the house at the same time with PEX, with manifolding to blow them out for winterizing or isolate them for repairs (more engineering overkill).
This shop originally had 3, 8’ wide garage doors, but I moved two of those over to the new shop and had a single 14’ wide door installed in their place to better work with the 2-post lift bay.
The shop now has umpteen tool boxes and tools, sand blaster, parts washer, extension power cable and air reels, welders, oxy-acetylene torch, badass wall-mount vacuum cleaner, 2 and 4 post lifts and all the other associated battery and air powered tools, a collection ranging from Grandpa’s old wrenches to HF impact sockets and the odd Cornwell/SnapOn/Matco finds from yard sales and eBay… just a hodge podge, really, but it works for me.
