Well, we're moving again. No, seriously we're moving.
Again. But not like that.
The Wood Whisperer is sponsored by Titebond.
I'll admit we do move quite often. When I left New
Jersey after college, I was really hesitant to
move to California in the first place.
But once I did make that move,
it seems like I can't quite stay put.
We moved from California to Arizona to Colorado
and now to Missouri. How you doing?
So why Missouri? Well, barbecue obviously, but there's
another equally important factor for moving to Missouri
and that's family. Longtime viewers will probably remember
me bouncing around shops in Arizona for about
10 years, including my supposed dream shop construction
in 2012. After having kids, it became pretty
clear to me that Arizona wasn't where I
wanted to raise my family. Both Nicole and
I grew up with four season climates and
if you're a fan of climate variety,
Arizona probably isn't the place for you.
So in 2016 we packed up and moved
to Denver. And in spite of it being
one of the most expensive places to buy
a house, I'll admit it was a bit
selfish on my part. I was really intrigued
by Denver...Not because of that. And honestly
I was so obsessed with getting out of
Arizona, I didn't bat an eye at leaving
my brand new 1800 square foot shop in
exchange for a more modest four car garage.
In YouTube years, it probably seems like we
just moved here, but for a frame of
reference here are my kids when we moved
to denver and here are my kids today.
Six years feels a lot longer when it's
measured in kids. Now if you want more
of the gory details as to why we're
moving, what spurred this on in the first
place I actually talked about it quite a bit
in the most recent episode of Woodtalk.
That's our podcast with my buddy Shannon and
Matt - 526 Missouricans is the title.
Go check that out if you want the
full explanation. But let me sum up here.
First and foremost is family. Pretty much all
of Nicole's family lives in Missouri. Our kids
have a ton of cousins, aunts, uncles that
they just never get to see. My closest
relatives live in Ohio New Jersey for some
reason London, the more bang for the buck
as far as family is concerned is going
to be in Missouri. And speaking of good
bang for the buck, another reason why we're
moving out there is because of that thing
called land something that's very hard to come
by here in Denver but in Missouri it's
a whole lot cheaper and we can get
a lot more land for our money. Now
I can't expand the shop that I have
here, it's a garage, I can't go anywhere
with it and if I want to expand
the business, I'm gonna have to look into
commercial property and around here that's gonna get
expensive, really, really fast. My vision for the
Wood Whisperer definitely includes having more employees.
And unfortunately I've tried having a couple of
employees here and we're really right on top
of each other and when an employee has
to poop where they're gonna go? That's right.
In my house, they gotta poop in my
house. Employees should have a quiet safe and
judgment free place to poop. So my ideal
scenario is a standalone shop on my property
with the space and the facilities to handle
as many employees and all the equipment that
I could possibly need. And chickens. I really
want some chickens. Another thing I'd like to
do is hold events. Something that I definitely
can't do here. But with a detached shop
on my own property, we could have workshops,
classes and just regular meetups. Now in a
future video, I might just go over some
of the properties we're looking at, show you
the shop spaces, at least what I can
show you, give you an idea of what
I'm looking for and what I'm trying to
avoid because there's definitely some traps out there.
I'm no expert in this and I'm really
just sharing my own like gut instinct on
some of these things. But who knows maybe
if you're in the market yourself and you're
looking for a place, this might be something
that would be useful to you, but we'll
cover that in the future. So with that
out of the way, what's next? Well,
we've got a house to sell. And ideally
I want to stay in this space and
work for as long as possible. The truth
is moving a shop is pretty much like
moving an entire second home. In fact,
we're handling it separately from the house move
and we're gonna get people who actually are
experienced with moving heavy equipment. Now, I've talked
with my realtor about this space in the
garage. Unfortunately, most buyers are really not that
concerned about the garage, especially if they're just
going to park in there like some kind
of animal. But the truth is the appearance
of this space is a lot less important
than things like the kitchen and the master
bedroom. So we've got a little bit of
flexibility in here. I mean when it comes
to staging a house, it's really all about
depersonalization. You want the new buyer to come
in and to be able to envision themselves
in your space. Not envision you in your
space, but that's the house. And thankfully the
garage is just a lot less important unless
the person is specifically like a car person
or some type of crafts person. So while
I don't have a ton of prep work
to do, there are a few notable things
that I can do to make this space
look as presentable as possible. I'll start by
doing something pretty simple opening the blinds.
I can't really film in here with light
streaming in like this. But my gosh,
does it open up the space when there's
natural light and a clear view outside of
the windows. And speaking of a clear view,
I'm definitely going to make sure that the
windows are clean. It's a woodshop, so they're
probably pretty dirty and while most of my
decorations are childish, they're not really offensive,
but anything that's questionable like my buddy George
here will be coming down and not everybody
gets the joke and we'll see him again
in the new shop. I'm also going to
clear off any surfaces and get the shop
as straightened up as possible. Kind of like
I'm about to do a shop tour.
I really don't care what room in the
house we're talking about. Clutter is just bad
news when selling and perhaps the most impactful
thing that I could do in my shop
specifically is to take up the floor mats,
floor mats are great for comfort in the
shop, but they do eat up a lot
of light. They also can make the space
appear smaller and they hide that beautiful epoxy
floor. So even if the space is destined
to be a parking garage, the average person
can certainly appreciate the aesthetic benefits of an
epoxy floor. A few years ago for some
extra sound dampening. I added these gray panels
all along the walls. Truthfully, they don't do
a whole lot and they look kind of
goofy. So I'll be taking those down. Now
the ceiling sound panels just might stay as
most of them are actually glued to the
ceiling, removing them would likely create more of
an eyesore than just leaving them in place.
However, I may take down the brown ones
since those are a little bit more of
an eyesore. Now one huge thing that I'm
gonna have to take care of pretty soon
is the fact that these two garage doors
are completely walled off. The openers are gone
and the tracks are gone. Thankfully, even though
I had no intentions of moving, I installed
these walls in a very non permanent fashion.
So while there's going to be a good
amount of labor to remove them, it's not
like I have anything structural to worry about
and when that time comes I'll take you
on the journey with me as we disassemble
everything but the timing of this is a
little bit tricky. I want to work in
this space for as long as possible while
I still can. And the problem is I'm
gonna have to book some garage door guys
to come in here to actually make those
doors functional again and this needs to be
out of the way to do that.
So how it's all going to pan out
if I'm going to get any work done
in here in the interim, I don't know,
we'll see how it goes. Alright. So I
still have some straightening up to do.
But for the most part we are clean
and I'm ready for people to walk in
here and say..."what the [beep] is going on
in here?" So it's a bit early for
me to make promises about what I'm gonna
do here. But I will try to document
as much of this process as possible.
It'll be more of a relaxed vlog style
just because it's a whole lot easier to
do. And I mean really, that's what I'm
doing is just showing you what this experience
is like. And also I have a couple
other videos that are just in the bank
right now that we're going to be publishing
that will sort of confuse the timeline.
You might see us go back in time
a little bit but we've got to publish
them. So it is what it is.
Alright, so a crazy couple of months ahead.
I hope you guys are here for it
and the vlog style videos will be clearly
labeled so that if you're not into that
it's okay. You can just wait for the
other videos to come out and hopefully we'll
be back to work with a functional shop
sooner than later. But either way, it's gonna
be a wild ride and I'm glad you
guys are here with me. All right,
we'll talk to you later. Wish me luck.