Building a New Shop - Site Preparation

Location is critical to the success of many endeavors. The new workshop location was much harder to resolve than I had anticipated. Although the lot on which it is placed is large, there were limitations regarding setbacks from the lot lines and road, convenient access to power and utilities, and integration / influence with existing structures. When it came right down to it, there were two "best" positions for the shop on either side of the house, one on the east and west respectively.

The eastern location offered a better path to the house, synergy with the garage and its hard-scaping. The down-side was more trees to remove.

Work actually began with cutting several trees. In total, 5 trees had to be removed as well as another that was in just bad condition. Of these only one was a good tree in a good location which we really hated to remove. All the others would have need to be removed sooner or later due to death or decay anyway. The one "good" tree is the one dominating the view in the picture below. I had all but one of these removed by a subcontractor.

I wanted to have water, LP, electricity, and perhaps some other lines like telephone run out to the shop. The electrician I consulted suggested running a new connection from the utility pole to the shop and feeding the house and garage off of that as opposed to running power From the house To the shop. This seemed to be a much better approach because I wanted to eventually change the fuse panel and meter location on the house any way.

In order to do this I needed to have a long trench dug with a couple of small branches. With help I laid two water lines (black), a gas line (yellow), and two 2" conduit lines. These were laid in a bed of sand below the frost line, covered with a layer of sand and then filled with a mixture known as "CA6" or "roadmix". All of this was tamped down with a portable gas powered tamper.

As the conduit was run, number 2 wire was inserted with each section. This size of wire is actually beyond the realistic capacity of the conduit size used. It was a little larger than what the electrician spec'd out but I got a good deal on it. Running it in place as opposed to trying to pull it was key to getting it in. The other conduit was empty except for a pull string. The plastic gas pipe had to be terminated with a special metal fitting to avoid having the plastic pipe exposed where fire could get at it.

This trenching was a lot of work much of it done in the rain and mud. We were EXTREMELY happy to get all this mess behind us. I planned the shop location out in CAD to ensure it would work with the building and such. I used the builders plans to double check the pole locations so that the trenches would all run clear of them and that the conduit would come up in the east wall. In the middle of the picture you can see my little green monster that made this literal mountain of work easier than it would have been otherwise.