Wrapping up the shop (interior)

Finish work is always slower, but we kept plugging away at the shop into the fall and it's pretty well wrapped up now, except for exterior siding, which isn't going to happen until next year.  So here's a tour of that work.

First, drywall.  Here's the front portion (the garage) all sheetrocked and ready for taping.  We did the rock ourselves, but I won't even try taping on this scale as it is a skill that takes lots of time to learn, and I am not good at it. 

 And the rear portion (the shop)

 It is always good to have help.  Here my helper was taping electric boxes to the vapor barrier to seal them up.

The guy I hired to tape the shop took a bit over a week to do it all.  He worked alone too.  I couldn't have done it in a month or two, and it would have looked bad.  First coat here was all I got photos of.

 Then I painted it.  2 coats of basic white primer/paint.  I bought an airless sprayer for doing the house, so this was the first tryout of it.  It got quite a workout as this came to about 50 gallons of paint.

This is mid September, and getting it painted was a huge relief as it now allowed to start moving some things in.  I had to wrap up final electric by wiring in all the outlets and getting lights in place too, but that goes fairly easy for me, even if it does take time.  I did that over the next couple weeks and the lights arrived and we put those up.  High output T5 fluorescent lights I got from a local commercial shop that I found through my neighbor (friend of his).  They are great lights and were cheaper in the end than I could buy at Home Depot or elsewhere.  Good quality stuff - very impressed.  Here is a pic of the lighting and the tractor finally being able to be parked inside for the first time.

After that I turned my attention to getting the radiant floor heat going.  Here are two shots of the whole system.  The heater is just a tankless water heater on the wall to the left (beige box with the big yellow sticker with the stainless exhaust vent going up and out from it).  The heat/pump controls are on top in the middle (I hadn't wired them up when I took this), with the 2 pumps directly below them (1 for garage, 1 for shop).  The other equipment on the plywood to the right is the internet/phone service for the property.  All utilities come into the shop first, then get distributed from there.

Here is the system fully wired and during filling.  Since we don't have water going at the site yet, I just got a big 40 gal tub and filled it from buckets I brought from home.  I picked up a cheap submersible pump to do the job.  It took about 30 gal to fill the system but went pretty quick - a couple hours at most. This was right after I finished filling (Nov 10).  I just fired up the heat yesterday (Nov 15) after getting the final inspection sign off on it, so now...finally... I have a warm shop to work in.  I set it to mid 60's to start, and will see how it stabilizes over the next few days.

I have gotten bad at updates and taking photos lately as I have been way too busy.  The framers wrapped up the house a couple weeks back, and I have working like mad to get things enclosed and ready for insulation.  The project was delayed too much and now I am up against winter without insulation or heat completed in the house yet.  We're trying to get there, but the weather has not helped, and we are running out of time before winter.  Some of the foam insulation cannot be sprayed if it gets too cold so that is a big issue driving this.  There is only so fast you can go doing this part time...

So there will be more updates coming on the house, but I need time to make it happen, and am under the gun with winter approaching.  We'll get there, but it takes time... Pray for a late start to winter!

Late update:  And finally we have heat!  Nov 15th was a big day as a lot of things got finalized then - we got power fully connected to the house, the garage doors got installed, and we fired up the heat in the shop finally.  Yes, there were a few inspections that day to allow all this...

Here is the shop heat coming up to temp.  It took overnight to get warm, but it is nice now.

 Kind of a long way from here, ya think?