Someone mentioned a shop tour awhile back, and then @wash11 had a neat idea-how about I show you guys how we ended up with a shop?
Seemed like a good idea, so without further ado, I’ll start the story of how our current shop came to be.
First, dirt work. It’s one of the things that newcomers that want to build their off-grid dream home out here in the sticks get their first dose of reality with. All over Arizona are lots of places that have, excuse my language-shit for dirt. If it isn’t huge rocks, it’s volcanic hardpan that eats excavation equipment for breakfast, and if it isn’t that, it’s volcanic based clay that has so much ground heave it isn’t buildable without importing a lot of decent material from somewhere else. And most of the time, you have more than one or all of these issues at one site. Add to that the cost of transport for heavy equipment and your dirt work bill can get real big, real fast. Pro tip-don’t decide to build your dream house on top of a friggin rock pile of a mountain unless you like spending cubic dollars on earth works.
We live at a place called Fort Rock, so you don’t have to imagine too hard what one of our big challenges is. 😄😄
We were lucky in that we happen to know a local guy who is a heavy equipment contractor with all the right gear (pro tip #2-your little bobcat or old clapped out back hoe isn’t going to cut it out here. ). And we caught him at a slack time.
He ran his old D-8, and I rented his big wheel loader from him. He ripped and pushed material from the cut, and I shuttled it to three different spots, as we were building three building pads with the material.
This was my view for a couple days.
Not a bad place to spend your work day-air conditioning, cushy seat, nice view… but I ran my ass off in that machine. The owner running that 8 is a past master operator, and I’m just an amateur, and keeping up with the amount of material a D-8 can push had me running full tilt boogie.
Oh yeah, did I mention rocks?
You ever feel the ground shake when 70,000+ pounds of machine hits a boulder and is stopped dead in its tracks? It’s impressive. I’ve got some cool videos I’ll see if I can post a little later.
Anyway, after several days and a lot of diesel and grease, a pad big enough to put a shop on was complete.
While I tended to some other dirt work, Denise learned how to place a rock retaining wall with our excavator.
Fast forward through some stuff that’s just not that interesting and it was time to finally purchase a building. There were a bunch of problems with that process, and the county at one point made things really difficult, but we finally got through it and hammered out a building that we could almost afford and the county would sign off on.
And then Covid hit.
We were in a real pickle, prices had already jumped due to all the permitting delays, and budget wise we were in way over our heads. And how bad or how long the work stoppage we were seeing was going to last was a serious concern. But we knew we needed a big shop and we had three sea containers full of parts and tools needing a home and we just couldn’t continue to function without a real shop.
And so, after several stiff drinks we put it all on the line, again, and signed a contract to purchase a 70×80 steel building.
And then the race was on to get everything ready for the building when it arrives.
One thing we had to do was dig the footings, and while I’m pretty good on an excavator, a bad footing dig can really screw your concrete and building. Luckily for me, one of our neighbors digs footings for a living, and he is without a doubt one of the best, and one of the smoothest operators I’ve ever seen, so it was a no brainer to hire him to do our dig. (Bryan at Bubbas Hoe Service in Kingman)
I was fortunate enough have made a great concrete contractor contact on a recent job ( Azteca Concrete in Bullhead) and he agreed to do our slab.
These guys knocked it out of the park for us.
We double checked all the dimensions and bolt hole locations and templates and they were all spot on.
Here it is the day before the pour.
He said he’d be on site at 1am on the day of the pour, and he wasn’t kidding, cause he showed up right on time!
They fired up their light plant and got to it, probably pissing off every one of my neighbors for a mile radius. Which is like maybe three neighbors, lol.
Things looked like they were going smoothly, and they were.
Right up until the concrete pumping truck that was supposed to show up didn’t. 😬😬
Turns out he “forgot “ and also conveniently turned off his phone. 🙄
I was pooping twinkies thinking there was a whole bunch of concrete on its way from 60 miles out that was about to have nowhere to go, but Azteca took it in stride and went straight to plan B, and dropped some form boards for the trucks to back in over, while I ventured out into the darkness to attempt to locate and guide the incoming tide of cement trucks to the right place.
You ever try to herd cats in the dark?
Yeah, it was kinda like that. 😄😄
By sunup, all the mud was in the hole, and the crew got to finishing.
And by the end of the next day, we had a slab ready for a building!
Here I am trying to recreate a funny picture that happened with a dog when we were at this stage of construction with our previous shop in Havasu.
Neither the dogs nor my hair were cooperating that day. 😄😄