Shawn's Shop of Everything
How the Shop was de-constructed and put back together

Introduction - So how DO you take down a 30ft X 40ft story and a half Fire Hall so that you can put it back together again. Especially if you have never done it before and it happens to be 70km away across a significant river with a Toll bridge in the middle. Well once you have the crazy idea in your head you have to convince yourself that it's NOT crazy, No matter what everyone tries to tell you. Then you think and plan and think and plan and think and plan. It's preferable if you do this during your work hours and nearly get fired for it. The rest of the thinking should be done during peak chore time at home so you almost get divorced. However, once you have convinced yourself and your family that this can be done that is the hardest part. The rest of this page chronicles each of the steps involved along the way.

I used to be a volunteer fireman for 6 years. From what I can get from the neighbors this building used to be an old blacksmith shop built just after the second world war. My grandfather was a blacksmith and some of my fondest memories are going to his farm in the summer and working with him in the shop. This will be my shop. And a bit of a salute to that way of life.

The Paperwork - In the fall of 2005, I read a small piece in the paper about the village of Welsford, New Brunswick building a new firehall and a tender came out to tear down the old one. These appear often in local Newspapers.

So you call around to a bunch of places in Government and finally find the people you need to talk to about putting a bid in and getting access to the building before hand so you can see what is wrong with it. New Brunswick has implemented something called Service NB, one of the smartest things they have ever done. All the government departments in one place. Thanks folks for that. Once you have a look at the building and talk to a few of the locals it's simply a matter of putting in a bid and waiting until the process finishes and they tell you if you have won or not. There are some quirks in the process, but I imagine they are different for each jurisdiction so I'm not going into detail.

Finally you are notified if you have won or not and given a set amount of time to finish the work. We had 15 days to remove the building and all its contents. I mean ALL its contents. In the links below you can see some of what was there. Including the kitchen sink.

The Plan - So how to dismantle an old building, move it 70km and leave it in good enough shape to put it back together again later. Some folks have simply torn them down board by board and put them back together in a different fashion. Many barns are moved this way. But this building was pretty well in the shape I wanted it so I decided on a different tact. I cut it up into large pieces, used a crane to lift the pieces and put them on my brother's flat bed pulp truck and stack them in a field until I had the new site prepped to receive it. Remember this all happened pretty fast. I would not have the driveway and foundation ready until early winter and the building would not go back up until the next spring.

When I was investigating things before I put in my bid I was surprised at the prices of cranes. I expected them to be between $200 and $500 and hour and that only large businesses could afford them. But really they are not that much more than any other piece of construction equipment and mine was only $80/hr. In total for dismantling and rebuilding I think I spent less than $1500. That's pretty good actually considering how much work it saved me.

So now we have the plan... cut it up into chunks, load it onto buddy's truck, haul it 40 miles to my place and put it back together. Pretty simple hunh? Well believe it or not it did go WAY simpler than I expected. I do project management for a living and believe me when I tell you that almost nothing goes as planned. But for all the big important stuff this one actually did. Below on the left is a "before" picture of what it looked like before we started. Notice the red building to the right of the one we are taking down. That is the new firehall. They wanted the old one removed so they could build on for meeting rooms and stuff. The red one was JUST garage space for the trucks. The "after" picture shows how clean we left the lot when we were done. They werepretty impressed and happy that we got it done as soon as we did and how good a job we did. The center picture on my home page shows the new shop and how it has been remodeled. We converted it to move one of the garage doors to the end and left one on the side. I can drive clear through the building if I want. You can also see that it is now a full two stories and still 30ft by 40ft. My shop has more floor space than my house... arr arr arr... I wish I could do a better Tim Allen impression. The bottom is going to be used for automotive tinkering and the upstairs is split between a 20 by 30 woodworking shop in the front and a "clean" area in the back where I can work on electronics and other things that need a clean environment.

Before we got at it. Maybe you can't eat off it, but still pretty clean.

Here are a few more pictures of what it looked like inside. We had a lot of work to do just to remove the contents inside before we could really even begin to take down the building.

The Details - After everything was removed from the inside we had to prepare for having the roof lifted off. I divided the front and back into 4 sections. Remember the long walls upstairs. They served as load bearing walls so I had to cut them as well. We simply cut up between the rafters and laid 4X4 under them for the crane straps to attach to and carry the load. Once the crane took up some slack we pryed apart the center ridge and the bottoms of the rafter just came apart at the joists. We took the center one out first becuase I was worried about how much support would be left to hold up the rest of the roof. But she seemed pretty well put together so I had nothing to worry about. It was not fun cutting through the gable ends but since I knew I was not saving them that's just what I did. Cut through the wall where it joined the roof.

These pictures show how we removed the roof and floor of the second story. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of taking down the walls. But basically I just cut them apart the same as the roof and floor and loaded them onto the truck.

Everything that we hauled away we just piled in a field next to where the new shop was going to be built.

While this all sounds easy and the machine did do a lot of work there was still a lot of manual labor. It took us almost a week just to remove all the things inside before we could even start with the crane. And while the big work was going on we still had to do all the little things like take apart the garage doors or shore up the beams or take down the walls upstairs and remove the kitchen sink upstairs and the flush downstairs. All the electrical and windows that I wanted to save. The stairs and the doors. We had many hours of slave labour put into just taking it down over two weeks and a LOT more than that putting it back up. But that's for another page.