So there’s been a lot of change at the Robieman Funny Farm and Menagerie(TM pending) in the past eight months. We decided summer of 2021 it was time to sell our house (first home) and move to ‘greener pastures’ – i.e. out of the west side of Columbus where we’d called home for the past 16 years. With housing demand at an all time high and the areas we wanted to move to that made sense for our work and family commutes, it was going to be a stressful time. We put on our big girl pants and started packing, getting rid of things where it made sense, and found ourselves a great realtor. When we got to the ‘what is it you want in a house?’ part of the realtor questionnaire, my only response was – it needs to have a shop that is heated and cooled or has the possibility of it, or land and ability to build a shop (with money in the budget for that to happen). Everything else is my wife’s department.
We sold our house in September with a move out date of December 31st. We placed bids, we lost bids. We looked at homes we thought would be perfect from the pictures, but in person… not so perfect (photoshop and angles hide a LOT of sins). We saw homes that were too big, too much acreage, too many things to change to make it us, at the top of our budget with three offers on it already, previous owners are selling it with whuuut in the world did they do to that electrical panel? In reality, we were starting to panic, wondering if we were asking too much to find our ‘forever’ home in this crazy market. During one of these moments on the way to a showing, I said to my wife, “I think we just need to look for our ‘for now’ home. It only has to be somewhere we can move and live for five years and then we can decide to sell or stay. There’s too much going on in the market for us to get everything we want at a price we can afford. So let’s look at these places like they are ‘for now’ homes.” She agreed. We looked at three houses that day, and our current home was the last one on the list. I never really believed in that feeling people said you get when you know you’re home. I don’t remember if I felt that with the last place. Getting out of the car in the driveway and looking across the roof of the car at my wife, I knew we both felt it. This felt like home. Thankfully, we were able to get a bid in with only one other bid and they accepted ours. We moved in middle of December and my first question was, “How much is the shop budget?”
Once my wife gave me the princely sum, I set to work figuring out how large of a shop I could afford and if I was going to end up building it myself or be able to afford to hire it out and actually get to use it before the snow started to fly in 2022. I also started the process of figuring out if permits were required, from whom, and how much that would eat into my budget. That was a confusing rabbit hole as we live close to a city but are in a township, not the city so the township does the zoning permit and the county does the building permit. Where we lived previously it all went through the county. I’ll leave that story for another time. We’ll leave it at – I started that process in February and didn’t have it all worked out until June. Even with the county having an online system.
The top of my budget was 30k and that had to include HVAC and insulation. With material costs and labor shortages weighing heavily on my mind, I got three quotes from post and frame builders for a 24 x 24′ garage/shop building. The quotes all covered site prep w/ 4″ concrete slab, building structure with frame and metal exterior, metal roof, one pedestrian door, a single garage door, and all OSB/lumber that goes along with it. All three quotes came in 32-35k for just the building. Mulling it over, I wasn’t willing to downsize to a smaller building. I could get one of the ‘local’ amish shed builders to build a 16 or 18′ wide building, but they don’t do anything 20′ or wider. I went looking at Menards as I’d seen or heard somewhere they build buildings. I was able to create several different versions of the building I wanted to build and decide what the most cost effective option was for me. I was able to come out with an $18k building, including fiberglass insulation. It would be tight, but I figured that should leave me just enough to hire out the truss/roof work and the electrical….or at least I hoped. Thus, SheShop2022 was born!
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