voiceover:the woodwhisperer is sponsored by powermatic, the gold standard since 1921. rockler woodworking and hardware create with confidence. clear view cyclones, clear the air and breathe easy. (lively music) marc:welcome to my pile of rubble. we didn't have an earthquake,
this is actually the side of the new shop. this is right next to my house and we have a sidewalk that goes around the perimeterof the yards of course. the first step is to chopthis beautiful sidewalk up and get it out of the way. as you could see, these guys did some serious damage today. actually started withknocking down the block wall
so that they can get aheavy machinery in here but man they made quite a mess. it's actually kind of cool though because we should be puttingin a 1,800 square foot shop that's going to be basicallybe in this area back. it's pretty intense, i mean this is reallyevery woodworkers dream. is to be able to build your dream shop, a standalone shop
but as soon as that realitycomes in to the picture and you really have to thinkabout every little detail, the whole thing, it just means there's a lot of pressureon your shoulders to make good decisions. one bit of advice if ihad to share anything at this stage of thegame is to stay flexible, build redundancy into things and don't expect thatyou're going to be able
to get the absolute perfectsetup right off the bat. just make sure that yougive yourself the option to change your mind withcertain things later. like committing to pluglocations and all that stuff, it's a lot of pressure. we're going to head in to the house and actually look at the plans, i'll show you theprocess that went through to get to this stage butthis is the mess we left
with after day one. the plans call for a very basic building at 1,800 square feetfeaturing three large windows, a set of double doors at the entrance, a small bathroom and a slop sink. the building will be attached to our home and we'll share patio space. in order to get homeownersassociation approval for this project,
we needed to make sure that the building looks like it belongs here. significant amount of our funds will be spent on thingsthat truly only effect the appearance of the building. a necessary evil but it's onethat we'll be thankful for, for years to come. the initial demolition took a few days and most of it was donemanually with the jackhammer,
bye-bye fire pit and we'll miss you. (mellow music) a good amount of grasshad to pulled up as well and unfortunately we havenumerous irrigation lines that need to be rerouted. eventually the big toys were brought in to clear the area for the concrete slab. within just a couple ofhours my new shop's footprint is staring back at me.
the next step was to digfor the concrete footers while the primary slab will only be about fourinches in thickness, the footer that goes around the perimeter needs to be much deeper and for those of you who arefamiliar with concrete slabs in colder climates, welcome to arizona, we do things a little differently here. after the trenching, anumber of things were done
including rerouting the irrigation system, placement of electrical conduit and placement of the sewage lines. rebar was added in various locations including the deep holes forthe patio support footers. conduit was then run underground for the five in floor outlets. now we're ready for the big pour. thanks to our insane summer heat,
the concrete truck arrived at 4 am. they started by fillingthe perimeter footer and then moved on to the slab. i'm always in awe what agood concrete team can do. they make an incrediblydifficult job look easy and i can seriously watch themdo this stuff all day long. the patio footers werethen poured by hand. now, i know nothing about concrete tools and terminology so letme narrate this thing
wood whisperer style. after the slab sets up a bit, the one guy uses a heavy boom boom stick to do something then the other guy usesa metal [dingle] hopper to do something else near the edge. later they surface the concrete with a motorized upsidedown helicopter thing it was pretty cool.
later that day the concretecutter guy stopped by to create some nice sawcut expansion joints. for a shop this is much nicer than having those widerounded expansion gaps that most of us have in our garages. tools will rollover thatwith no problem at all. the next day they completed the patio pour and made the connectionto the existing patio. i had to keep the slab wet
in order to help slowdown the curing process so i had a giant wet concrete slab to play with for a few days. i did what any self-respecting35 year old man would do, i bought out my rc carand drove my dogs nuts. (happy country music) of course you can't do much framing without the materials sowe had lots of deliveries. the two by six walls were laid out
and constructed on the ground first. the osb sheathing serves double duty as it protects the new concrete from getting damaged and later it's going to beapplied to the patio roof. once each wall was completeit was lifted into place and secured using scrap lumber. i have to say sometimesi felt like a real jerk being an able body human being
watching this guys bust theirbuts in 115 degree weather but i did it all for you. by the end of the day i had something that vaguely looked likea building in my backyard. this big old header was installedpurely for resale value. someday if we do windup selling this place i want the buyer to know that they can easily convertthis space into a garage. now it's time to attach the osb sheathing.
the roof trusses weresupposed to be lifted into place with a crane unfortunately the crane operator was going to be extremely late so my contractor tookmatters into his own hands. watch how they manuallylift the trusses into place, this is just amazing. more osb sheathing helpstabilize the structure and not a minute too soon
because later that day wehad a big desert sandstorm. thankfully nothing was damaged. the next order of business was the patio. the supports were securedto the concrete footers and the headers were placedon top of the supports. of course the real trick is making sure that the new patio ties in perfectly with the old. to make the proper connections
roof tiles from the existing roof needed to be removed whilesaving as many as possible. this gave the builders theaccess that they needed to connect and extend the patio roof. one of the very fewcasualties of the build, my kitchen window. whoopsy! the shop will have itsown 200 amp subpanel, as well as water and sewage.
the only way to getthese things to the shop is to dig trenches. most of the digging was done manually due to sensitive wiring in the area and our soil happens to beextremely well compacted but here's a good look at the conduit. one for electric and two forany utilities and future needs. in order to accommodatethe new 200 amp subpanel, our house panel needed tobe upgraded to 400 amps.
here's a look at thenew panel installation. the plumbing required its own trench which had to cross the driveway and make its way to the front of the house where it tied into theexisting sewage line. once again care had to be taken not to disturb thelandscape irrigation lines. before i knew it though, the final connections were complete.
most homes in arizona haveclay or concrete tile roofs and ours is no exception. strips are laid down tosupport each roof tile and then the tiles arestack neatly in place by a tile setting crew. man, these guys are fast. the following day, the regularcrew installed the tiles. i can think of several good reasons why i do not want that job.
the exterior stucco codingstarts with layer of tar paper, followed by styrofoam sheets which then followed by a wire mesh. the product being used hereis called western one code and despite its name itactually goes on in two codes. the material was mixed on site and immediately applied to thebuilding as a scratch code. (relaxing music) after a couple of days of cure time
they came back to do the finish coat. now obviously it's incredibly important that the finish coatmatch the house exactly. of course a couple of coats of paint makes things look nice and pretty. the rest of the project wassomething of a whirlwind, here's the electrical,plumbing and ac rough in. before i knew it, the shophad windows and doors. the installation guyswere in and out in a day
putting r19 in the wallsand r36 in the ceiling. of course the next thing iseveryone's favorite, drywall. i was in awe of the sweet vehicle that i like to call the drywallpicker upper dropper offer. if you have the means i highly recommend pickingone up, there so choice. the drywall crew workedat a blazingly fast speed. this guy was driving screws at a rate of about 1 screw per second.
the tape and mud work was done over the course of several evenings. now you know why a pair of stilts was added to my christmas list. the drywall received the knockdown texture to match what we have in the house. while i can understand why some folks don't like textured walls, they really do make repairs a breeze.
as you can see, i was also looking at somepink colors at this point and speaking of painthere's the paint crew working on the ceiling. nice respirator. with the vast majority ofthe interior work done, it was time to focus on the floor. i decided to go with thedurable epoxy coating. when it comes to epoxy,preparation is everything.
usually they do an acid edge but because we have no drainage they had to employ adiamond grinding technique. using these massive grinders, they abrade the topsurface of the new concrete giving it a strong mechanical tooth for the epoxy to bond to. thankfully they broughttheir own dust collection. you could see the useof small handheld unit
to get into the tighter spaces. now i tried to get some footageof the epoxy application but the odor was absolutely unbearable so here's a shot of the first coat drying a few hours later. on day two, they applya clear protective coat while embedding a fine nonslip grit and some decorative flakes. here's the final result,
it's easy to clean, it's nice and bright, it's super durable, and it's nonslip. after the floor was done,the electricians came back to finish up the lightingand the floor outlets. the very last thing to be done was the remaining patio pour. although it wasn't partof the original plan, we decided to extend the patio to the entire front area of the shop.
this is going to be a great place for me to store my cargo trailer. now i'm going to fast forward and show you what the shop looks like a couple of weeks later. the tool move was pretty uneventful and i did document atool move in the past, it's pretty much the same thing except for this time we didn'talmost tip over the table saw
so it actually was a littlebit better in past experiences. really it was fairly easyjust to move the tools into the various positions and i had a pretty good ideawhere i wanted things to go, kind of worked thatstuff out ahead of time. what i want to do now isshow you some of the details, give you a little justification behind some of the things that i did, things that i couldn't do whilethe build was in progress,
so let's go take a look. of course power is a hugeconcern for any workshop so the shop has its own 200 amp subpanel. we ran about 11 to 20 outlets and i think the final totalwas about 18 110 outlets. all 20 amp on the 110 and i have a mix of 20 and30 amp circuits for the 220 but you could see thisis the typical layout. every place i had power,
i kind of wanted tocluster things together because you just never really know whether you're going to have a 110 tool or a 220 tool there in the future. i've got a nice 220generator receptacle here and then i have the standard 110. this is throughout the shop. i had a basic idea where i wanted things but i wanted to build in redundancy
because the truth is untilyou're in that workspace you don't really know exactlywhere things are going to go. if there's no flexibility and you just based everythingoff to some theoretical design you're going to land yourself in hot water so lots of redundancy built in. another thing that i did was i installed ceilingoutlets and floor outlets. now this allows me todo a number of things,
first of all i no longer haveto run a cord to the wall if a tool is in the middle of the room. it could just basicallygo in to the power outlet right in the floor whichis a really nice treat. the other thing is on the ceilings, if you have extension cords like i've got theroboreel setup over here. you may have an air filterthat you want to plug in to the ceiling,
those things are nice tohave ceiling outlets for. definitely plenty of power in this shop, i've got no complains about that. i almost forgot about this guy, i included a 110 poweroutlet here in the floor because my festool setup typically is in the center of the room. whenever i run power to one of my ct vacs i always have to run apower cord to the wall
so this is really nice tohave everything self-contained and no wires to trip over. of course living in the desert it gets darn hot here. i'm a bit of a wimp when it comes to 120degree fahrenheit day. to do what i do for a living i got to be in the shop every day. i need something to cool this place down.
what you see behind me on the wall is a mitsubishi ductless mini split. as i was talking aboutthis stuff on the website during the build and blogging about it, i got a lot of questions about that and i just thought i would share with you some of my reasons fordoing this type of a system as opposed to a standardducted hvac system. really two primary reasons,number one is efficiency.
these units are just incredibly efficient, it don't cost nearly as much to run and it makes me feel a lot less guilty about cooling this place downin the middle of the summer. the other thing is theyare exceptionally quiet. just the noise in my housefrom a regular hvac system would be way to loud for me to film with, that sort of background hiss will just create thishorrible sound in a video
that you guys would probablynot enjoy very much. with this units running on low i should have no problemkeeping the place cool and also keeping it so that the video has really no idea that there's any noise in the background. the only drawback to this unit is the fact that it is on the wall. it takes up wall space
but with the shop of this size it's something that ithink i could work around without much of a problem. i've got three of these interior units, two exterior units. the two at the front, icould turn on separately from the one in the back. if i feel like these twocan handle it by itself or maybe i'm not workingon the back end of the shop
i could just put these two on. if i'm comfortable then i don't have torun as much electricity and i could save a few bucks but ultimately very happywith the choice on this. used this in the past inthe other small garage there and it worked really well there. i have to give a little bit of a shout out to my buddy vic hubbard
who throughout this whole process and even before when i made the decision on the other unit, was always there to give me guidance and making good decisions aboutthe air conditioning unit. thanks vic, i always appreciate that. let's move on to the lighting. now i've turned the turned the lights off so you could actually seewhat i'm talking about here.
we've got a series of fixturesthat go down the shop, they're 8 foot in length and the fixture itself isbroken up into two sections so we have four bulbs in each fixture, each bulb is four foot long. they are t8 bulbs, thespectrum of light is 6,500 k, that's a little bitbright for some people, not everybody likes that. some people want to be down there five
instead of all the way up at 6,500 but that works for mefor a number of reasons and i'll get into some of that later. the spread is pretty even across the shop, there is one problem that i notice though, after this was installed it was something i couldn'thave really predicted until i was in the shop. that is the very, very back,
it's a little bit dark back there. i think what we need is another row. i just didn't notice wheni looked at the plans that there was actually roomfor another row of lights if we wanted to put them there. thankfully that's somethingthat's pretty easy to extend the circuit and put two more fixtures back there. overall if you're going for shop lighting,
i think t8s are a must. the other thing is the light spectrum, i mentioned that before,6,500 k is great for me. i think that's what ireally like to film in and part of the decisionthat i made with the lighting is concerning the filming because it's such animportant thing for what i do. that's another concern asit pertains to the windows. that's something i got alot of questions about too.
let's take a look at those. one of the most common pieces of feedback that i received about the shop was, "hey where's all the windows?" i really only have three windows, you see one here, one over there and there's one over on the other side. of course my double doors in the front have two big windows inthe doors themselves.
the thing is i've actuallyset this shop up intentionally so you could see exactly why i can't have big brightwindows in my shop. what happens is the automaticiris adjustment on the camera, it's affected by all thesebright light over here and the bright light over there and just dims the rest of the picture. now of course i couldput it on the manual mode but the problem is
when there's too muchbright light in a picture and it's not dispersedover the entire image, you wind up with issues like this. it just makes my work a lot harder when i'm trying to film something. that's the reason why idon't have many windows because all of those windows need to receive some sortof a window covering. i need to black them out when i film
so the only light thatyou're going to see coming into the shop is from thelights in the ceiling. as much as i love to have a ton of windows just because that makes fora great woodworking shop, it doesn't make for agreat filming environment. unfortunately i went withthree that was even more than i was reallyoriginally planning on doing but i couldn't resist puttingone over on the other side. overall when i'm ready to woodwork
without the camera on, i'vegot plenty of natural light. then for the filming which really is the mostimportant part of what i do, i've got the right setup for it. obviously i still need window coverings but that's the explanation for why i don't havethat many windows here. the final thing i wantedto show you real quick is the slop sink andof course the bathroom.
no real need to show you the bathroom. it's just a toilet and a sink and then of course thisis just something that, it's a really nice privilegeto have in the shop. i've never really had plumbing, i've never had a place to wash my hands or to dilute a water basedfinish or something like that. for me, i have thisproblem with distraction and i've worked fromhome or near home enough
to know that if i can gointo the house for something, if i have some littleexcuse, i will go in there and i will probably kill 30 or 40 minutes doing something stupid instead of working throughout the day. knowing that about myself, i knew that having a bathroom in here and making sure that i wascompletely self-sufficient was absolutely necessary for me
to get a lot of work done during the day. despite the fact that my backdoor is about 20 or 30 feet away. it's a little mind gamethat i play with myself, it's certainly nice to have in a shop but for me it was a must have. i just need to remove all possible reasons to go into the house duringthe day to bother nicole although i probably still come up
with a few good excuses but at least i'm trying. the project began on july 2nd and was completed by september 25th. estimated time framegiven by the contractor was 60 working days. actual total, 62 working days and it's not too bad consideringwe had a number of changes and delays due to thingsout of our control.
the contractor we usedwas rounds construction and i highly recommend them if you happen to be in the phoenix area, check them out at roundsconstruction.com. there it is folks, that'sthe dream shop build. it seemed like it took forever but when you look at the calendar it really was a short amount of time. these guys just came in here
and knocked this project out in a very, very short period of time. if you look around, thingsclearly aren't done yet. i still got a lot of tools set up to do, i've got the dust collectionsystem to finish up and you could see backover my shoulder here the clear view systemis up and ready to go. i just need to installall of the duct work and believe it or not i'mwaiting on one little clamp
before i can do that. as soon as that comes in i'll proceed with theduct work installation. there's a lot of little things here, we're going to have some storage projects coming up pretty soon. anything i think that youguys would be interested in as i move forward if itpertains to the shop build, i'm going to show you all that stuff.
i got to say aside fromthe obvious reasons of why building a dreamshop is just awesome, it's every woodworkers dream. i think this is really,really good for the show. i think having more room to work, more room to stage bettervideo shots for you guys and it's just incrediblyinspirational for me. i just have a renewed energy to go back in and show you guys everythingthat i'm working on
whether it's on the freesite or in the guild. lots of great things to come. i'm really, really excited about it and i just want to thank you guys for being here with me through all of my shopchanges over the years. it's not really so muchundecided, finicky thing that i've been switchingshops back and forth. unfortunately it was by necessity
and finally i feel like we have our home. we have a place wherethat we can call home and just continue to buildthe future of the business from this location. i hope you guys will continuewith me on this journey, some great things to come and of course thanks for watching.