Fortunatley the regulations in the small city we are in allow for the owner of a property to do any work themselves. If we were renting, then we would have to have a licensed contractor to do anything and if we want to use an outside contractor for anything anyways they must be licensed to do business in the city. The inspector does like to come look at work being done though, both while in progress and near completion just to be sure things are being done correct and safe. The place is wired for mad power, 600 AMP service with outlets everywhere, all in metal conduit. I do have to run 3 240v lines though, 2 for the battery backups, and running one to the kitchen so we can put a stove/oven in.
In total there is about 21,500 sf of space. The main showroom/production building is currently about 2800sf with a back attic area upstairs that is roughed in and wired but still needs ceiling, flooring, and drywall which would add another 1000sf up there. It has 3 air units, two 2.5 ton for the main open showroom and a 4 ton which handles the office area downstairs and upstairs. The attached main shop is about 5000sf, this building is massivley insulated and currently has 3 78,000 btu gas heaters hanging in there as well as a 6 foot exhaust fan, 1 grade level door that is 20ft wide x 15ft high and a loading dock. Then there is a raw warehouse building which is about 9600sf, another long narrow building about 80ft x 18ft, plus a couple of small sheds.
We also own an ambulance service and will ultimatley be moving the HQ for that over as well. Going to finish out a large part of the warehouse building as office space for that.
The sheer amount of lumber that was left behind by the old millwork is staggering. Easily 10 tons of it. Probably 30 new doors both interior and exterior, 40 or so new windows, a few hundred screens, 50 or so big custom laminated arch beams, and more.... Thats been the bulks of the work so far is simply moving all the stuff over to the back of the big warehouse building.
Costs are already adding up though.... needs some roof work which a contractor quoted about 5k. The asphalt needs about 5k worth of work. The exterior of the building needs about 5k worth of work. Not going to tackle the roof myself though. Some things like the asphalt are not critical and can be done later and a bit more slowly once we get moved in and stop the financial hemmoraging.
Future proofing the network cabling by going with shielded cat 6. Man that stuff is chunky! About as thick as RG6 coax.... Be nice to assure 10g network connections though. Also going to install the 2 servers, the SAN's, all phone and network equipment in a central network closet. The 2 primary design workstations will get direct attached to the SAN via fiber optic cables I still need to run. All computers will currently run on gigabit ethernet through a 24 port switch. The internet access and wireless are controlled through a Cisco SA-520 router which has an active web filtering subscription and nice firewall and VPN abilities to allow remote access and to keep the employees for surfing for things they should not be....
Also couple more shots. Aerial view and view of the front.
