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The focus of this thread is the physical work I did to set up a new, insulated grow space inside an existing structure; cannabis specific concerns are not discussed in any detail, and mod permission was obtained! I'll be very happy to ignore some decent number of "lol stoner your fuckin trim job SUCKS", because it's true, I was in a hurry and this was a "do things safely, do things functionally, and aesthetics are a distant third concern". Background: I live in Vermont. At some point I will do a whole house thread because it's our first experience as homeowners and there's been a fair amount of weird or interesting poo poo here, but, I keep putting a more general thread off. Since we legalized weed in 2017, I'd been growing in a 3x4 box in the basement. This made both my wife and I miserable: the noise irritates both of us, she has grass allergies, our house uses radiant heat and this setup created cooling issues in the summer, and the basement, being prone to being hyper dry and hot all winter but bordering on swampy sometimes in summer was just not a good location. Additionally, having all this bullshit down there was occupying a lot of useful shop space which we're eventually going to need as our kids get bigger and need separate bedrooms. (Also, our older kid turns 5 soon, and is increasingly less predictable about doing as told, so moving this into an exterior and locked space makes a lot of sense). So, this created a situation where I'd ripped my grow apart, but was going crazy trying to redesign it in a way that didn't suck. I should comment that I grew up watching my dad do a decent amount of projects like this and my basic take was, you had the right tools and then said "gently caress" a lot, but I'd never attempted any of this. On the other hand, my wife in addition to her general architecture background has done several Habitat for Humanity and similar projects and has a lot more direct experience. My wife's background is architecture (one more test to pass!). She pointed out that our property has this existing ~20x20 unfinished shed on it, and her take was that a corner of it could be converted to an appropriate indoor space. Further, she thought we could probably get this done within the 3 weeks of scheduled leave I had coming up. That made me groan a bit as it was not exactly how I was planning on spending leave. Initial goal: Create a roughly 8x8 insulated, structurally sound space inside this shed with minimal 2x20amps safe power which can remain > 65F in VT winters and < 75F in VT summers without much intervention. Project Budget: I figured this was gonna cost around $4,000. I did sorta okay on this, details at end. Note that all cannabis grow and extraction equipment was already owned with limited exception, so this is mostly a wood and screws budget.   My wife figured out what she thought was a reasonable solution for a floor and how to connect it. She went on to put all this in CAD and periodically gave me CAD printouts when I expressed confusion about WTF to do next. She was a great designer, drafter, PM and labor helper on this and if this had been entirely up to me the results would have been unsafe and terrible, even moreso! Screws: I don't own a framing nailer and they are $200 plus compressor to buy, $300+ for cordless, $80 to rent for a day. Since I was doing a small space and own a number of decent drills, I decided to do everything with screws, excluding joist hanger connections that needed to be nails for structural heave reasons, and I just ate the pain to my already hosed shoulders driving those since it was not very many in the big picture. A note on that is that while no one I know owns a framing nailer, every rear end in a top hat and his brother offered me a finish nailer. Who are these people who are constantly doing finishing work and never need to frame anything?  This was here and "full of a bunch of poo poo" when we moved in. We stored mowers in it, and, I also took to throwing "other poo poo" such as a ton of scrap wood and old toys in there. When I started this nonsense, we were in Hoarder Hell:  The first step was to clean all that poo poo out and then start excavating dirt.  I loving hate shoveling, it's my least favorite thing after being off the ground with a chainsaw.  Hating things seems not to be a reason they don't happen. Here's gravel, this was even less fun to shovel but also it was much cheaper to get 2 yards of gravel delivered than I would have assumed and the driver did a real good job getting it pretty close. If not for a tree he could have gotten it all the way up; generally it would be nice if that tree was gone except it's a 150 year old maple and I will murder anyone who tries to take it down. (That poo poo is relatively rare, VT was clearcut and most of the maple I tap up here is like 40-60 years old). Existing structure is supported by PT 4x4s. The ones on the corner and exterior center go down much deeper than I wanted to excavate but were not cracked or rotten where I did excavate. We do not know if these are on footers, or not -- most of this stuff around the property is, but we chose to assume that it's probably not. Additionally, the building has a lean to it, it's off by about 3" in both directions at the far corners. On the other hand, it's leaning directly in to a wall of massive trees. It's not going to go over in that direction, but we're going to start pushing it back the other way next summer with help from an excavator; when we do that I may need to revisit some of the spots I lagged the new 4x4 framing into the existing and loosen them, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. In any case my wife convinced herself that it's structurally fine and not gonna collapse on me after doing the excavation.    We built a 4" deep pit that is at the right level to connect to the existing framing. The geometry is loving weird in some spots because I wanted to have as close to a square space inside of a building with a 20 year lean to it, but mostly it worked out. That center 4x4 there should have been more straight, that was just lazy and resulted in having to do weird cuts on the 2" of rigid foam that we put on top of 2" of gravel.    My wife discovered she could cut rigid foam a lot faster by using a butane torch to heat a knife to red hot and then slice through it. I WISH SHE HAD ALSO REMEMBERED THAT WE OWN P100 VOC FILTERS THAT WOULD HAVE MADE THIS LESS MUTAGENIC, but she assured me that she "had the windows open and good ventilation"    At this point we're 9 days in and I am worried because I feel like we're behind schedule. I shouldn't have been, building the floor turned out to be substantially harder than I was prepared for, but once that was done and solid, everything else started to come into place. So what we've got here is PT 4x4s with 2" gravel, 2" foam sitting under a PT 2x4 frame with r13 faced insulated running through it, with 5/8" CDX on top of it.    Alright, cool, this dumb space with dirt back needs a wall. Rear wall there is 1/2 PT ply, I put roofing Ice & Water sheeting down the back so water runs down it to the gravel layer, and I am going to sink a PVC pipe with holes in it into the bottom of the pit behind this and then fill it up with gravel. I was able to observe behavior of water during a rainstorm during construction which was somewhat helpful.    At this point things are a bit more "normal", I am just building 2x6 walls with r21 faced inside them and the weirdness is "existing space with weird geometry" which I do my best to ignore, just using a level and working to make sure the actual space I am building is square, and then making whatever weird decisions that forces me to make when attaching to existing. There was already one 20am circuit coming over here, so for that one I just needed to move the box and light fixture and there was enough slack to do that (with the circuit off, of course). The outside wall I sealed with structural amounts of caulk, leaving the bottom seam clear as a moisture escape.  That cat of mine, always tagging poo poo up! Annoying.    Spengler is super on brand for anyone who knows my forums history; in any case, I was Mr. PPE on this even more than I might have been otherwise because one of my cousins here is a HCW and holy poo poo do I not want to need to interact with our overloaded medical system right now. I took my motorcycle off the road when Delta reared up, our hospitals are hosed.  Alright, we've got a room! I am waiting for Lowe's to drop off a pre-hung exterior door still, but I'm reasonably confident I did a good enough job leaving a level and right-sized cutout for it, as well as accounting for the door sweep. We'll see.  This is the point where the time left on the clock got real and I thought "gently caress doing decent trim, and gently caress trying to do super airtight corners given that I will be running a 50-190cfm exhaust out of here 24/7 anyway. The shelf shown here was temporary, just a place to stick poo poo and have light while I finished off the rest.  This is where stuff started to get fun. Silver insulation, 750 real watts lighting, intake and vent fans mounted to the walls. The lights are hanging from eye bolts that are going into 2x4s screwed into the ceiling rafters, I can hang my full weight off any of it and it doesn't move.  This might be stereotypical, but, that's just like, your opinion, man.  Being able to look at Miro while I make ethanol hash with that loop makes me happy.  Boneheaded thing I did: I wanted my air intake at the bottom of the room (correct) with the minimal amount of ducting (correct) and also wanted it HEPA filtered (super correct in Powder Mildew Land), but I didn't think about the fact that this is gonna get covered in snow, and I should have put both vents at the top and dealt with ~6' of duct running in the wall. Too late now, so I am going to build a little hovel to keep snow off the filter and have an air pocket there and hope for the best. The tree shown there kinda sorta maybe supports the structure,  . I had to axe about 20% of its root system to make this all possible, Google assures me anything less than 25% won't kill the tree, so we'll just have to keep our eyes on that fucker! In general I am going to have the lean addressed next summer with, minimally, some 6x6 45-degree bracing, and if I can push it a bit straighter over a year then we'll dig out the posts and dump concrete down there, I expect. It's not a den of inequity without some Stanley Mouse or R Crumb, take your pick, I went with Stanley.  And here we are in basically the final form, with some of my outdoor crop drying in here to boot. That's a 2x2 tent in the corner as a seperate vegetative growth spot for seedlings, and I built a surface over that for my extraction gear to run on.  Of course, being me, I pulled gigabit cat6 out there. In theory I might do more automation down the line, for now it lets me keep an eye on what's going on in there from the house, which is good.  1300w greenhouse heater on a fire-proof mat; 5000 BTU air conditioner. These are on temp switches, AC kicks on if it gets over 78 under the lights, heat kicks on if under 65. Remaining work Like I said, I only had one 20a coming out here. That's fine for everything except the heater + AC loop, which would pop breakers constantly, no doubt. Right now, I have 12g exterior extension cord bringing power in for those devices, with a breakered box at both ends. I have spoken to two local electricians, both think my setup is "fine" if it has to sit like that for a while and if I am really using 12g power cord and breakered plugs, but they will be happy to come out and wire a couple additional 20amp runs out there for me, and it sounds like I'll be able to get that done within the next month or so. I won't be able to bury it until next spring, so I'll have some slack left in the lines, and run it through outdoor conduit. Other potential upgrades / remaining hazards: I'm pulling water out here with a hose, which means in winter, running a hose from an indoor spigot which is not going to be very fun. Putting an actual water line in is certainly doable, the cost may get into a world I don't want to deal with; on the other hand, it'd follow the same basic path as the electric lines will, so maybe I just bite the bullet and do that. It seems quite possible that I will finish off more of this space to use as non-weed shop space, or even build an office out here; time will tell. That's one reason for getting 2 additional 20amps out here instead of just one. (I'm unlikely to ever want to expand my plant operation that much because we have plant limit laws that make it pretty impractical to scale my lighting and space beyond what I have here). Having an actual fire suppression system out here would kick rear end but I'd probably want argon gas or something since water would absolutely destroy all the equipment anyway, and that's, again, getting into insane prices (and would also require a real seal, I've been through an argon system installation once at a job site). If anyone has any other ideas about fire suppression I am all ears. Is it flat? When I finished the floor I put a marble on it in various places and it doesn't roll. My floor is flat. My walls are basically straight. If you look at where they join the existing, your brain will do some mild Escher poo poo. Materials In general I bought: 7 sheets 1/2 PT ply (exterior walls) 9 sheets 3/8 CDX (interior walls) 3 sheets 5/8 CDX (floor) 16 10' 2x6s non-PT (wall studs) 10 10' 2x4s PT (floor joists) random 2x2 pieces for shimming out some weird stuff to 5.5" 4 8' 2x4s non PT lots of screws assorted extension cords, breakers, etc saw blades, joist hangers, etc shop lights AC unit heater unit additional 100w LED lighting exhaust & intake fans and ducting Tools used, in order of importance BACK BRACE LiON drill circular saw sawhorses many such screws and nails level 90 degree metal square 4x tape measures i kept misplacing myraid knives and blades P100 repirator, eyegear, 4 different pairs of gloves, etc Makita LiON chainsaw miter saw shovel zipsaw hammer prybar Monies spent Hardware stores (lumber, insulation, nails, AC, tools as needed): $3700 Amazon (mostly electronics, heater, timer, power strips): $1250 Gravel: $150 Exterior Door, hung, delivered: $400 ----- 5500 on a 4000 estimate == 37.5% cost overrun. Oops, whatever. My existing lights and extraction poo poo would add around $2500 to do this as a completely new build out. Next: barn????? We'd really like to finish the top floor of our barn, which already has power and water run to it, as well as a good existing floor. It would be a lot more space but I actually think in some ways it would be easier, and I have a much better idea what we're up against with that, as a result of this project. A fundamental takeaway for that would be, as the barn also has a (much more minor) lean to it: I would definitely, no question, pay an excavator to do a decent job pushing the barn level and adding new supports to keep it that way, before attempting to renovate that (much, much larger and heavier) structure. Also if I had this all to do again I would absolutely spend a couple hundred bucks on a set of metal guards for making straight circular saw cuts. It didn't matter too much here, but I also was not very concerned with the aesthetics or perfect seal. Cabbages and VHS fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Sep 23, 2021 |
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Sep 23, 2021 15:43
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Cool
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Sep 25, 2021 14:36
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I enjoyed reading this.
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Sep 25, 2021 20:10
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one small correction: in fact, the idea of getting this done during my leave was mine, because when I get an idea on my head it's like a squirrel with a nut, and the idea of the project bleeding over into work time, or doing something temporary when a more permanent solution was possible made me crazy to think about. my wife also commented that posting her first sketches and not the final drawings and cad layouts looks rough as hell, but that's what I had on hand haha. my own rough sketches are much worse!!
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Oct 2, 2021 14:45
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