Before You Build A Shop

How To Put Up a Shop (the boring stuff

Episode 526 Autorestomod

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Jford@autorestomod.com

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Before you do ANYTHING, know your local ordinances for county (if outside the city limits) or city. Find what zone you live in as well. This will help you to narrow down the rules that you will have to live by.

You might get lucky and have a web site available for your area like Q Public that shows the zoning and lot lines to help you establish yourself. Link for our q public county map below. We are in an RC zoning district, the most restrictive zoning in Aiken County. We chose this area because fiber optic was a reality, not a “some day soon”.

A) Find out how long permitting takes. In our area a permit typically takes 7 to 10 days. Areas with several metric tons of bureaucracy it will take longer—certain areas of So Cal are over a year for permits.

B) Make sure there are no new rules on the horizon. Our zoning rules changed just after we got approval for the building. Had we been four days later with our permit we would have had to either get a variance (read more wait time) or reduce our structure size.

C) Understand the rules. Some areas require that you have them out at each stage of construction; from lot clearing to concrete to final building.

D) Know the rules. We have a friend who’s new business construction is in the city of Aiken. The city forced them to add a retention pond to the front of their business property—even though there was a retention pond on the property already. She fought and won to have the new pond filled in.

E) The friendly (but squeaky) wheel get the grease. Our permitting went on for four weeks. Vacations and people out sick kept pushing us back. I was always courteous when going by to check on things. If they told me give it another week, I did. Dad always told people who wanted him to go faster with his work: If you don’t like this speed you really won’t like the other. Making them hate you won’t get your permit done faster.

What should you put up?
That is a personal and availability issue. Around here, the least expensive pole barn was January. The next lest was November or December. Our research showed that a pole barn was, at the time, more expensive than a metal building. That has since flattened out.

THE BUILDING
Which is better, metal or pole?
Yes.
Metal goes up quicker on concrete. Our construction time will be two days. That does not count insulation.
• Most all metal buildings can be insulated the smaller buildings like ours will have less than wonderful insulation. I plan to insulate with R13 in the walls and R13 on the roof.

Any time you put up a metal building or pole barn, you will have more ambient noise from the metal. We had been told that spray insulation will reduce noise from rain and such...it does not. The quietest building we have had was with a shingle roof.

Stay even. When you are building, construction “likes” even numbers. SO if your square footage calculations sa you can max out at 37 feet, go 36, your waste pile will thank you.

Big box on the wall (electrical). What ever you think you will need...add more. We are putting up a 30 space box. And we discussed with our electrican what we’d be running. Welders, compressors and tools.

Both can be a pain to insulate and drywall depending on construction type.

Tip on pole barns to make insulation/drywall easier: get the Girts horizontal between the truss supports. It will be more expensive, but make drywall easier to do.

On the metal building side, our building has the walls with what appears to be an odd stud center. This will cause us to have to do some creative framing for the insulation and walls. We are also not going to float our drywall so that we can easily make changes to the electrical or what ever.