shop addition

[Signed Out]

View attachment shop addition plan.pdf

Let me start by saying thanks to all who have given good advice to us over the past 2 years as it has helped us to get to this point. We are outgrowing our shop and planning to put an addition up this summer. brief background: our current shop (left side layout) is 35'x28' 12' tall celings and a 10' tall overhead door. No bathroom. No running water. All of our tables and equipment are on wheels so they can be moved around if we need to bring a vehicle inside for an install. (huge pain in a**) not to mention we hate opening that overhead door, we are in a very dusty environment. We are also located next door to our parents welding shop and we have access to a 65'x25' bay with 13' overhead door about 75% of the time, recently this is where we do most of our installs.

We have been getting busy enough to where we will consider hiring help, but have nowhere to put them, or any bathroom or breakroom. We feel that we can grow this business a lot more as we are pretty much doubling from year to year. Problem is that with just the 2 of us we are constantly back and forth, and almost at our limits, running out of time to do sales and everything else. Our plan is to get an addition up by fall and look to hire an employee towards the end of feb/march, when things really seem to pick up again from slower winters. I want to run this layout by all of you to see if there is anything we are overlooking or to see if anybody had better ideas or what works well for you, etc.

Our basic concept is that our current shop will become an office/dirty work(sanding, painting, etc.)/ small install bay. The addition we will put on the back will become our print/production room and will feature a bathroom! Does a sign guy shi* in the woods?...

With this we will be able to pull cars/trucks/small box trucks into the front of our shop without a huge headache, not have to do all "dirty work" outside and away from the equipment, be able to hire employees and continue to grow. Oh yea our current shop has a leaky flat roof. as part of the addition we are going to put trusses over both buildings and have a peaked non leaky roof. I could go on and on but will spare you for now. Thanks again.

 

[Signed Out]

maybe this is easier to see.

 

[CanuckSigns]

looks nice, where is the bathroom? and more importantly, where is the coffee pot?

 

[Graphics2u]

Look nice! And a non leaky roof is a very good thing!

 

[Signed Out]

the bathroom is in the lower right hand corner. some concerns we have is the placement of the door between the 2 buildings and how moving stuff around from shop to shop will work out. Would like to put double doors in or very wide door, not sure on that yet.

 

[ddarlak]

Would like to put double doors in or very wide door, not sure on that yet.

blow out as much as that wall as you can and make huge sliding doors, so when you need the big open space you have it, when you want it closed, you have it...

 

[2B]

looks good, did not see a break room.
would seriously think about separating the design/rip to separate machines


for the walk through would have them with the hinges on the perpendicular wall side,
Having a door that open to open space is a PITA, always getting in the way. having it open and against a wall much better.

 

[Signed Out]

we were thinking about a sliding door. the existing building is block, so to put a door in there we are going to have to cut out a void and put a sill plate in there before we can cut the door out. No big deal, we can do it over a weekend and hardly have any down production time. now if we were to do a sliding door, i guess we could just do the same thing and put the sliding doors on one side of the wall? Wouldn't be able to hollow out the block. I think double doors would be easier to do and cheaper, but sliding doors would be nice. We were also considering a roll up type door kind of like a garage, but think that could become a pia.

 

[Signed Out]

We have been running our shop with 3 computers. 1 is the rip and also design (my partners comp) I have a laptop that i use for design, and bring out on sales and also a desktop for book keeping. It isnt ideal, im sure our system takes longer to rip than if we had 1 dedicated to rip, we will someday. Probably end of next winter we will hire someone and think we will have plenty of room to add up to 2 design stations in the future. How much quicker does a machine rip if that's all it does? Seems to me that when we first got started and that computer was new and not cluttered up it ripped faster.