"Ray's AKA demonfire's XR4Ti build up"

Ray · Post by **Ray** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 9:06 am

New mod. Quite time consuming and expensive, but i have a feeling it will be worth it.

Teaser shot...

BeefFajitas · Post by **BeefFajitas** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 11:49 am

I hate you.

pyropete125 · Post by **pyropete125** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 1:29 pm

2x4 interior and sheetrocked?

Ray · Post by **Ray** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 2:03 pm

Okay, this might be a somewhat long post and for that i apologize. Story is as such:

Our last house was fairly small, 2 bed, 1 bath, no garage. We are planning on having more than 1 child, so it was time to start looking for a new house. Great time to buy a house in this market. Great rates and low prices. Bad time to sell. Took 10 months to sell my house, and took somewhat of a hit. Got more than I paid, but not more than i had into it. Probably lost 17,000 dollars or so. Oh well. Live and learn.

Found a house we really liked, which we didn't want to lose (i'm sitting in my new house right now), so we lowered the price of our house we sold to sell it as quick as possible. Got an offer 10k less than our asking price. Lowballed. Great. Got the offer up a few thousand, but turns out we had to replace our roof, with sheathing. There goes another few grand. Anyway, we had to be out by X date. The house we bought was a short sale home (look up short sale- it was a nightmare).

So we waited 5 MONTHS for an answer from the sellers' bank. We were out of our old house. All of our stuff was in storage. And we stayed in my old bedroom at my parents house. Great. My old bedroom, maybe 200 sq feet, housing my wife, myself, my daughter, my dog, and my three snakes. Luckily, Adam (SVTADAM) has turtles and watched my snakes as my old room was very cold.

So, we stayed there for 5 weeks. Every day i drove home from work was a nightmare. I felt like I had failed my family. It was great to spend time with my folks and all. It was great to save 5 weeks of mortgage and utilities and food, but I wasn't used to "where are you going?" questions and "when will you be back" questions from the 'rents. I was miserable.

Again, luckily, the people we bought the house from let us move in early, before we even closed. We had final approval from the bank but their PMI carrier had to sign something and a letter... oh god that letter, had to be generated. So, we were in limbo. They let us move most of our stuff in, I helped them move their son's stuff to storage with my truck. After we closed on Dec 4th - i let them stay with us. The husband /father is a Major in the USAF - he's in Afghanistan - it was the least i could do. We became friends and roommates. They left today (transfer of station forced the home sale). They're on the way to Hawaii, and i'm here now. The son, who's saturn i'm trying to help him sell, is staying in CT (not in this house) to finish college.

Anyway, so we buy this house, and we're moved in, and it's been a crazy train ride.

Anyway, i bought the house because of the garage. The driveway sucks, as the house is on top of a hill, but still, the view is AMAZING.

Anyway, If you read this far, thanks for caring. Onto some pictures. I'm going to post this now and edit as i dont want to lose all this text. I'll host a TNE G2G soon - but if you're car is very lowered *cough* drew *cough* you wont be able to make it up the driveway without scraping.

I will now edit this post to add some pictures of the garage progress. No images of the house yet, but i might add some.

attached 2 car garage. This houses our daily drivers.

detached 3 car garage. you get a feel for the hill. 24'x36'. My truck will live inside but there is lumber stacked and boxes and random crap i have to organize. The saturn is the son's and we're going to be selling it. he's getting the little mazda SUV as they can only transfer one car to the new station.

so you appreciate the amount of work this was... no studs. post and beam. T111 siding that was tacked on. No power. No lights. I had to stud, then secure the siding, then wire... actually, then get POWER out there was the first thing, then ... anyway, a lot of frickin' work. It's getting there but might be a few more months before i'm really "done" - it's my most expensive mod so far.

only have 20 amp 120 volt service so far. Come spring i'll run some 230volt 100a service out with proper sized wire. Already buried the conduit with the string to fish new lines thru. This is BEFORE I WAS DONE - the wires are now obviously stapled properly.

Excuse the mess. Under construction and this is where we stored all our stuff while we were homeless. I wish i knew the roof leaked THEN. That'll get fixed come spring too.

my baby's in a proper home now, on stands, in a building.

R19 insulation with 7/16" OSB sheathing.

I didn't want to have to few outlets. I think I succeeded. I figured, hell, it's my shop, i can do what i want.

Actually, there are two runs of outlets. One at 30" off the floor, one at 48" - the lower one is for the 20a, upper is 15a.

6 8' long lights - one per bay, then one per work area. This is before all the lights were up. Light of day any time of night. and yes, they're on their own breaker.

Car audio boxes galore. Washing machine being used like a temp work bench, tool tray. Anyone need a washer? I took it from the old house only because the guy that bought my place undercut us on price and we didn't say they conveyed.

getting there...

yes. that's gollum.

sunday morning, 20 dec. 20" of snow. (ignore the dog pee.)

And the XR is NOT covered in snow. Huzzah.

If the images do not show, here is the photoalbum link
http://picasaweb.google.com/raymond.covino/NewHouse#

Thanks for reading, and Merry Christmas.

thebronze · Post by **thebronze** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 3:13 pm

Congrats....Looks great..........I'm jealous...My XR is out in the snow right now

pyropete125 · Post by **pyropete125** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 3:30 pm

sweet! where in ct are you now?

we are redoing our house next month and i am putting up a 25x30 2 bay detached garage w/ small work area with a lift

money is cheap and nows the time when people are hurting for great prices on construction [BTW i am a non-union iornworker]...

pete

whitelx · Post by **whitelx** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 3:52 pm

nice garages. I'm jealous.

Ray · Post by **Ray** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 4:38 pm

Thanks. 7 years of working on gravel, most of the time in the snow was enough for me.

I'm now in Columbia. Used to live in Mansfield.

Mike McCreight · Post by **Mike McCreight** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 7:04 pm

Awesome...
I love it when a plan comes together.
Certainly will be a memorable move, eh, Ray?
I closed my first home (back in 1988!) in escrow. here were a few sleepless nights, for sure. All worked out in the end, still own it!

Your shop is JUST what I was going to build here. I purposely moved JUST outside the city limit, then we got "Amalgamated" 9 months after I moved in, about 2 months before I was to submit my application to build.
Now I have to move (again...

) to be able to build. And I LIKE it here!
Nice pics.
Keep us posted!!

Post by **turboxr** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 9:13 pm

Jealous.

hotrodtodd68 · Post by **hotrodtodd68** » Fri Dec 25, 2009 6:29 pm

Nice garage. A good end to a long story. Merry Christmas!

Post by **DPDISXR4Ti** » Fri Dec 25, 2009 11:49 pm

demonfire wrote:Anyway, i bought the house because of the garage. The driveway sucks, as the house is on top of a hill, but still, the view is AMAZING.

You bought my house Ray? I didn't know I even had it up for sale!

Congrat's....

Post by **anglin** » Sat Dec 26, 2009 1:20 am

Wooooord. This *has* taken a long, long time. Congrats! I can't wait to see what craziness flows out of there now that you've got great garage space.

BeefFajitas · Post by **BeefFajitas** » Sun Dec 27, 2009 1:27 pm

Looking good!

I have a couple friends that did short sales and they were all nightmares. You would think the banks would want to get out from under all that mortgage, but they just drag it out.

Ray · Post by **Ray** » Mon Dec 28, 2009 5:59 pm

Nate, yeah they drag them out because if the owner is still paying, or paying some of the note, they lose less.

Anyway,

Saturday we finished the workbenches for the most part and started hanging some peg board. I still need to insulate the upper walls (only insulated 8' down right now) and also insulate the cieling. But anyway, we had about 2' of snow, which melted to about 10", then saturday night was raining pretty hard. maybe 2.5" of rain over night. Basically a worst case scenario - frozen ground, melting snow, and lots of rain.

Went out to the shop, about 1" of standing water in about 1/2 of the building. My friend still had my shop vac (also a wet vac) so i had to go get that, and some hydraulic cement to fix the floors. The people who built the building did not use proper isolation joints btwn the concrete, so the hydrostatic pressure basically had water coming up thru the floor. Hoorah! Shop vac the water out, clean the joints, break out the respirator and angle grinder with a masonary bit, cut a channel for the cement, and basically patch the floor. Fun is. Took all day. Then went outside and on the upslope tried to dig a ditch to keep water away from the building.

Forecast yesterday was almost 60 (allowing me to dig and do concrete work), right now it's 33 or so, and i think today is a high of 37 and chance of snow? Gotta love new england. highs in the 20's 5 days ago. almost 60 yesterday, and snow today.

WTF.

Progress from the past two days. The rain today (freezing rain, snow, then rain, then the sun came out...) had no water come inside. I did get that small ditch dug yesterday, seems to help relieve some of the pressure.

Today, I insulated the cieling with those rigid foam panels. Eventually (spring) when i fix the roof, i'll finish that then blow insulatation on top of them. Also insulated the aluminum 9x9' doors and did some r19 then OSB btwn the bays (the walls btwn the doors).

Pics

Yes, the bay all the way to the left is being used for storage right now. Almost everything in there will be moved to the attached garage (lawn stuff) or to the furnace room (storage stuff). Excuse the mess. I'm under construction, still unpacking, and have been going nonstop for a few weeks... or months... now.

starting to organize tools.

Left bay will be metal working and welding.
Center bay will be general work area.
Right bay will be wiring and clean area (clean assembly)

the insulation has that foil layer to reflect heat.

most of yesterday was spent doing this... I also took advantage of the problem and tried to make the floor more level - ie, cut out the 1/2" frickin' lip that was there and blend the floor so it's not quite so much of a gap.

getting there...

Thanks to Joe (hEaT) for helping today.