Barndominium/Shop or "real" House?

[LouNY]

Last week was kind of a miserable week for working outdoors, temps down into the low teens and windy, then it "warmed" up to the 30's and low 40's with rain and wind.

 

[WinterDeere]

Last week was kind of a miserable week for working outdoors, temps down into the low teens and windy, then it "warmed" up to the 30's and low 40's with rain and wind.

Yeah, we had a brutal early December, here. Several mornings of single digits, with afternoons in teens and twenties, with many of those days too windy. I was trying to do wiring on a trailer, and it’s real hard to keep fingers working on tiny splices and crimps at those temperatures, let alone make heat-shrink tubing shrink or solder a splice.

 

[ETD66SS]

Yeah, we had a brutal early December, here. Several mornings of single digits, with afternoons in teens and twenties, with many of those days too windy. I was trying to do wiring on a trailer, and it’s real hard to keep fingers working on tiny splices and crimps at those temperatures, let alone make heat-shrink tubing shrink or solder a splice.

I am really looking forward to my heated concrete floors in my shop after 30+ years of working on vehicles and equipment in the cold.

 

[WinterDeere]

I have 5 garage bays here at the house and a 6th much larger at a rental, and my shop is both heated and air-conditioned, so I get to do most vehicular work indoors in heated (or cooled) comfort. But this trailer is too big to fit in any of those here at the house, with any sort of ease.

I will admit to one big mistake, tho. My shop has two heated bays that are only 20 feet deep, since it's built into a standard 18th-century carriage barn, which were pretty much always 20 feet deep. I should have put more effort into expanding the footprint of the structure in a way that gave me deeper bays, when I electrified, insulated, and re-sided the building. I was having trouble envisioning an easy way to do that without violating property setbacks or really blowing the project up bigger than I'd budgeted. But as is often the case, a plan to have done so became apparent to me after the project was completed. Doh!

I have two 25 foot deep bays attached to the house, but my tools are 150 feet away in the carriage barn, so not real practical for working on things.

 

[pmsmechanic]

I have two 25 foot deep bays attached to the house, but my tools are 150 feet away in the carriage barn, so not real practical for working on things.

It wouldn't take me long to have 2 sets of basic tools.

 

[WinterDeere]

It wouldn't take me long to have 2 sets of basic tools.

Attached garage is for cars, kids bikes, sports equipment, and refrigerators and freezer. I'm happy enough having all my tools in the detached shop.

At some point, despite having spent a fortune on building out that old carriage barn, I might very well blow up the whole thing and start over with a larger footprint. I'm currently paying to rent a very large garage bay to store a few boats, and it would be very nice to make space to bring them home, in addition to making more space for working on larger vehicles indoors.