My New House & Workshop

[Rick W]

Get a sign shop to print this out 6 feet tall, and stand it up across the street from your shop.

No one will see your wall

 

[Rick W]

I think I suggested something like this before. Find something you can put in front of the crack, and then put it symmetrically up and down the wall so it looks like it’s all supposed to be there.

 

[Jim Oaks]

Here's one of the few things I don't like about Texas:

It's warm today and the sun is heating up the house. It's been cold but jumped up to the 60s. I've heard a few popping sounds telling me the house is moving. Here's a couple of cracks. I think one of these is new. I actually filled that last one before I painted that wall. I'm going to have to recaulk a few areas along the crowm molding.

The soil here moves a lot. Newer homes are all on concrete slabs. Mine has a foundation with floor joists. I dated a woman with a slab foundation whose house moved so much it busted a window.

On another note, it's going to be warm all week so I'm going to be back to work on the shop remodel. If all goes well I'll have all the wiring done ran. I need to dig a trench to run 2ga wire from my house to the shop. I really didn't want to dig another trench after last year. I guess the electric and water have to be 12 inches apart. The plan is to mount the sub panel, drive a grounding bar, run the cable, and then let an electrician make the connection to the sub panel and the breaker panel at the house.

 

[Rick W]

Here's one of the few things I don't like about Texas:

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It's warm today and the sun is heating up the house. It's been cold but jumped up to the 60s. I've heard a few popping sounds telling me the house is moving. Here's a couple of cracks. I think one of these is new. I actually filled that last one before I painted that wall. I'm going to have to recaulk a few areas along the crowm molding.

The soil here moves a lot. Newer homes are all on concrete slabs. Mine has a foundation with floor joists. I dated a woman with a slab foundation whose house moved so much it busted a window.

On another note, it's going to be warm all week so I'm going to be back to work on the shop remodel. If all goes well I'll have all the wiring done ran. I need to dig a trench to run 2ga wire from my house to the shop. I really didn't want to dig another trench after last year. I guess the electric and water have to be 12 inches apart. The plan is to mount the sub panel, drive a grounding bar, run the cable, and then let an electrician make the connection to the sub panel and the breaker panel at the house.

On the cracks, I had the same problem in my house after I added the second floor. But mine wasn’t from ground movement, mine was the big piece of roof that was over the cathedral living room moved like a sail in the wind, and it would crack the walls underneath it at both ends and along the seam to the wall. The painters dug out all the sheet rock mud, and they put in about a 3/8 inch wide caulk seam. We did it intentionally with a little indent, like the mortar between cinderblocks. Nothing has cracked since in over 15 years.

If I didn’t tell you where it was, you would never notice it. But if you look, you can actually see the caulk lines. But they’re straight and square with the windows and the walls, and nobody ever notices it compared to a crooked crack at an angle.

On the workshop, I think when I built the shed of miracles, the code here was to be 30 or 36 inches deep for the electrical. But they did let me put it in the same trench as the natural gas (18”?) and the water which were not as deep (15”?), but I don’t remember the exact details.

You may want to put your electrical in a conduit, even if it’s underground feeder wire. Probably only talking 20 or $30 worth of plastic conduit, but it’ll make a huge difference when you’re planting a bush someday and you forgot where the wire is.

The other thing I did? I ran a 1-1/2” conduit from the house to the garage for no purpose whatsoever, and I put a nylon string in it, so when I needed to do something, I could just pull it through. Now, 30 years later, there is something like six different things running through that conduit, plus about a 3/8” poly/nylon web airline (so I can blow stuff by the kitchen sink). Alarm system, phone wires, there’s a push button on my house wall to open the garage door, I don’t even remember. Every time I pulled a new line in, I made sure I pulled a new nylon string. If I had to do over again, it’s full, I’d put in a 2” conduit!

Always just my two cents, food for thought, hope it helps.

 

[Jim Oaks]

Last year something was digging tunnels in my yard and I ended up catching a couple of moles in a scissors trap. For the past couple of months something again has been tunneling in my yard and making mounds of dirt, but I haven't been able to catch it. I got a different trap and yesterday I dug down and stuck it inline with the tunnel and covered it up.

Today I checked it and was surprised at what I found:

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Definitely not a mole, but it won't be tunneling through my yard anymore.

 

[Brain75]

I second the "put an extra conduit in the trench" and will even say I go so far as every conduit I lay in the ground gets a cheap junk wire ran the full length day 1 (locator service or rent a locator clamps onto the wire and makes it a cinch to find it) - even do it with conduits that have some other wire in it (so you don't have to unhook power to your shed to use the power wire as a locator).

 

[Jim Oaks]

I need to look at my internet. I have a cable coming into a box that gives me wifi. I need to see if I can run anything off of it to the shop so I can have internet out there as well.

 

[Curious Hound]

I need to look at my internet. I have a cable coming into a box that gives me wifi. I need to see if I can run anything off of it to the shop so I can have internet out there as well.

Normally, your router will have several ports on it. You can run an ethernet cable from it out to your shop. That’s the most secure way to extend it out there if the WiFi signal doesnt reach.

 

[Brain75]

be mindful of max length of ethernet - they make repeaters (that take power to boost the signal).... unless your buildings are really close together it is easy to go over the max length and end up with a useless signal at the end.

 

[Shran]

100 meters is the length where you start running into issues with ethernet cabling.

Re: cracks in the walls - I'm dealing with that right now too. I have drywall cracks in almost every room and a lot of them appeared just this year. I think it's just been so dry that the ground has settled way more than it usually does... my house was built in '53 so you'd think it would have happened already though. I'm just going to leave most of them... I've tried redoing the taping, caulk, and whatnot but they just keep coming back. Looks like crap.

 

[Rick W]

I have dish TV with a master control box in the upstairs bedroom, and a Joey remote box in my living room room where there is no TV. I have the Joey set up to feed my office behind the living room downstairs, and my kitchen next to the living room. I’m in the process of feeding it to the bedroom above the kitchen, and I also have a line run to the crawlspace through the conduit to the shed of miracles, and across the shed of miracles. It’s the regular TV coaxial cable.

Since the Joey box is at the pivot point of the kitchen, office, and upstairs bedroom, that remote works from any of those places. I bet the run to the shed of miracles is 75 -100 feet of cable considering the routing. I can’t use the remote out there, but if I set the station in the kitchen, I get a crystal clear picture. I’m also in the process of putting a second TV, a little one in the other end of that garage and just teeing into that cable. I already checked it with a cable across the floor and it also has a crystal clear picture.

In the companies I worked for and the real estate I do, we have done several things with the R 14 eight pair cables (old phone line cables with the flat plug), and we’ve also done it with CAT 5 cable, running them at least 100 feet without having to add any repeaters. But if you got a fuzzy picture, a repeater would probably take care of the problem.

I’m always long winded, but my underlying point from seeing pictures of your property is you shouldn’t have any problem whatsoever running any kind of Internet or TV cable out there and having an adequate signal.

Finally, you could run the cable out there and then put a Wi-Fi on the other end, so you have a solid feed to the garage, but then Wi-Fi inside the garage. Personally, I like hardwired if it’s not something I have to carry around with me. It may be old school, but it’s full proof, and you could pick up that wire for nothing these days.

One last thought on the phone, cables, TV cables, cat, five, etc. If you kink the wire, it can cut the signal strength by as much as 80%. You want to make sure you use wire that has not been bent or kinked, and make sure you don’t do it when you’re pulling the wire to wherever it goes. If you do have a kink in the middle, straightening it out will not fix it. But you could actually cut it, and put in a coupler, and it will work about 90% as good as new

My two cents, hope it helps

 

[SenorNoob]

328 feet total between powered devices is pretty hard to exceed on a small residential plot. For reference, a square acre is roughly 208FT per side. Most things will work past that with some signal loss. If you really need a connection longer than that, there are other options. No experience with the linked product. It's just show the possibilities.

 

[Jim Oaks]

Last year I replaced the roof on the shop, fixed the facia, painted the building, and replumbed it.

This year my goal has been to finish the remodel of the interior.

Here is the room in the mid section of the building:

The upright propane heater sitting to the right of the door was where you see the 2x4 framing to the left of the newly added storm door. Prior to that it was just open.

I built a closet / pantry where that heater was, and an L-shaped cabinet with a 2x top that's big enough that I can put (7) large plastic storage containers under it with a shelf that will allow me to store things above those containers. This will help me get rid of the storage containers sitting around the shop and make up for the lack of storage in my house. There's also a small fridge under the counter to the left of that closet so I can grab a cold drink while working out here. The white cabinet on the floor by the closet is a vanity for a sink that will slide back from where it's at and fit in the corner between that door and the bathroom door. You can see the top that I'm making for it on the sawhorses.

I took a break from this because I really needed to finish the rear part of the shop.

I actually had this area cleaned up and had built a Bronco II in here but never finished the ceiling. It got messed up when I moved all of the stuff from the middle room (above) to here so I could do that room.

I rewired this part of the shop and added some junction boxes. None of the old shop lights had been wired into a junction box, and I also needed to add (2) junction boxes with cover plates so I could access those connections without having to crawl across the attic. You can see them side by side in the pic below.

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This I finally re-insulated it. As a reminder, I had moved the joists up in part of the ceiling, so I had more room to park my truck in here and put it up on jack stands.

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Then I drywalled and textured the ceiling (it seemed easier to texture it to match the rest of the ceiling than to take down all of the texture and smooth out the ceiling.) I also primed and painted the sides of those joists and added corner trim to clean it up (not shown).

I left an opening to access the attic space to get to the (2) junction boxes that are up there. I still need to build a cover for it.

During this time my daughter-in-law gave birth to my first grandchild, a little girl they named Samara Elizabeth Oaks. She was born March 13th and came 3-weeks early.

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Then on March 31st as I was painting the ceiling in the shop and got a call from my sister that she went to my mothers and found her on the floor unconscious and barely breathing. I stopped what I was doing, loaded up my truck, and headed for Ohio, but my mother passed around 5am while I was still on the way there. My father had passed several years ago, so working out my mother's arrangements fell solely on my sister and me.

While losing my mother has been a sad loss, my mom had been dealing with pain and discomfort for several years and had told me several times that she was ready to go and for it to be over. So, there's some peace in knowing she's not in misery anymore. I just wish she could have seen her great granddaughters first.

Five days later on April 6th my daughter gave birth to my second grandchild, a little girl they named Charlee James Russell. Yes, my granddaughters middle name is named after me.

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If you follow my posts, you've probably also seen that during this time I've been going through an ordeal with my homeowner's insurance going up, my mortgage being increased an extra $481 a month, having to get new home insurance, and the old insurance company mistakenly cancelling my truck insurance instead of my home insurance. So, it's definitely been an interesting few weeks. I'm ready to get off this roller coaster and for things to smooth out some.

I'm also ready for this shop to be done and to start building or re-building things inside of it.

TRS Garage.

Stay tuned!

 

[RobbieD]

I'm so sorry to hear about the loss of your Mom, Jim.

But two new grandchildren are a blessing.

 

[Rick W]

So sorry about your mother, maybe a blessing that you understood her situation and came to grips with it so quickly, but it’s still always a tremendous loss to lose mom.

And wow, those granddaughters are beautiful! Do they live close together? Can they both drive grandpa Jim crazy at the same time?

In our prayers, and all His blessings.