Restoration of an old skate rink

As some of you know I bought a new building to move my shop into something bigger with a better location. Bought the building almost a year ago now but didnt start working on it until this spring.

Building was former elks/moose/vfw..cant remember and seems to be very little info i can dig up that tells me for sure what it was originally built for but in the 50's it was remodeled and a hardwood maple floor added to turn it into a skate rink. To the best of my knowledge it continued on as a skating rink until the mid 70's when it was revamped once again as an auction house for a few years then sat empty for nearly 15 years. Mid 90's it was reopened as an auction house until closing again about 6-7 years ago. It sat empty once again for a few years until it was rented briefly to store cars inside for a transport company. And thats where i came into the picture, It had been up for sale for the past 10 years and i heard they were getting desperate to sell it so i went to have a look, we hashed out a deal and i signed my life away on a new building.

As you can probably guess by the history of the building with all the years of sitting empty and being run as an auction house that seemed to specialize in selling junk that nobody wanted and appeared from the outside to be more of an expensive hobby than a true business it was/is in pretty bad condition. The transport company that rented it pulled all the copper plumbing and 50% of the wiring out to turn in for scrap along with the furnace and all the easily accessible duct work so that they could make their rent payments when their business slowed down.

So here she is in all her ugly glory....40x120 on the main building with another 1200 square foot of odd ball rooms added onto the backside of the building.

 

We started working on it this spring so i have a couple months worth of progress to post pics of but with only working on it 2 Sunday's a month progress is pretty slow.

First phase of the remodel was getting the building cleaned out and the tin pulled off the walls so we could see what we had to work with. To give you an idea of just how big it is....third pic down is of an extended cab ranger and geo tracker parked inside

 

Looks like that should give you plenty of space once you get it looking how you want it to. Hope the remodel goes smooth and on time for you.

 

3 layers on the ceiling....yaaaaah me. Thankfully step dad works for Sunbelt Rentals and brought home a man lift to use for a weekend. I forget just how many loads I hauled out of here, probably close to 10 just from the ceiling.

 

no time frame to complete it. trying to pay cash for the complete remodel and only getting 2, half days a month to work on it with 2 people and occasionally 1-2 more sundays with just me putting in half a day. Going to be a long slow process

 

Nate it was cool meeting you last weekend. Can't wait to see the new place when you finish it!

 

Chit...wish I was a little closer, I would donate some laborer time.

 

Always nice to put a face to a name

 

Me and Rafe(friend/shop tech) work on the building about 6 hrs every other Sunday..... For some reason he thinks he needs at least 4 days per month off... keep telling him you can sleep when you die and it's good to work 7 days a week but he doesn't believe me for some reason

 

Look at all those tabs open. It's a wonder your computer still runs with all that open!

 

amd 8 core 4.3GHz with 16GB ram, 500GB SSD.....I can open up double that many tabs and still work just like normal. I have the computer set up so that as soon as i turn it on every one of those tabs automatically opens, from powered off to up and running and checking emails is about 30 seconds

The other computer.....its a different story, 2 tabs and it blue screens, facebook and it blue screens

 

building was essentially empty but cluttered with trash when i bought it, we managed to pull 4 loads of scrap out of the trusses after the ceiling was down and that 4 loads was with crushing all the duct work flat before loading it, duct work started out at 4' diameter. whoever installed it actaully cut the trusses to fit it up in.

 

found 2 broken trusses plus the one they cut out to fit the duct work. We patched them by glueing and screwing 10' 2x6 across the cracks after jacking them back up into position.

 

Here is what the ceiling looked like after pulling down the 3 layers that were on it.....there was a layer of 1" styrofoam first, then a layer of paneling, osb, plywood just basically whatever they could find to nail up, then the layer of tin that the vast majority of nails and screws holding it up went into just the paneling or styrofoam.....only a few screws per panel actually hit something solid. most of those boards were nailed up to the trusses with brad nails

 

Floor in this place is going to look amazing when its done, I have plans to actually refinish the floor. 40' of one end of the building we are pulling the wood floor out and pouring concrete for the shop so i will have 1600 ft of maple flooring to use for patching in where the floor is in bad shape. We were driving the cars around inside the building and thought the floor was pretty solid until we brought the manlift in....it almost fell thru the floor in one spot that someone had previously patched. So we pulled up their patch to see what was going on.......not surprisingly we found Termite damage that they had patched over......and not a good patch. they pulled up all the eaten up flooring and just laid a double layer of 3/4 plywood down without even attempting to repair the floor joists. No pictures of the finished product but this is after tearing everything up......14 joists ended up needing replaced in a measly 17 foot span along with the rim board. Floor joists measure almost 2 1/2 x 8 1/2 and are spaced 12" OC.

 

BTW if you look closely at the footer you will see the floor joists sit on their own row of cinder block......foundation appears to be 2 rows of cinder block wide, one for the walls to sit on and one for the floor joists to sit on. Walls are 2x6 walls with someones rough guestimate of 16" OC, trusses are homemade 2x6 2'OC so for being almost 100 yr old old building it was built to last. everything is rough cut lumber except for the trusses, they are actually finished pine lumber for the main parts with rough cut used for the upright braces.

 

my new shop, 40x40 shop area, 24x40 parts room, and 56x40 showroom.....although my daughter and sister are using it as their personal skating rink until its finished.

 

As you would expect for a 100 year old building with 40' of clear span, the trusses had sagged about an inch in the center. That worried me a little since there had been no insulation and for the most part, those 3 layers of ceiling were pretty light since the tin was aluminum and my plans call for drywall and a minimum of 18" of insulation. We decided to add a beam down the middle of the building to prevent further sagging of the trusses because the last thing i wanted was to have a nice finished ceiling and a year down the road have it start cracking when we get a decent snow.

Manufactured I joists were just what the doctor ordered. 2 1/2 x 11 1/2 I joists doubled up sounded like it should plenty strong enough after hours and hours and hours of research on floor/roof loading and strength charts on I joists.