LOL first off I am not going anywhere specific with this post. Just sharing some of the stuff I do and build. So it is a bit all over the map. Just thought while working on some of this today, some might find it interesting or give ideas. I do things my way and how they work for me. That does not mean that is the only way or that what I do is for everyone Seems to me they of the most basics of basics. I will share my dry storage building and my latest work bench to replace Grandpa's bench that finally broke and is getting brittle after 48 years. Good dry storage or any storage for that matter is OFF the Floor and it does not matter how many bandaids, tampons, toilet paper and bullets you have....... you need shelving to put them on. A good building separate from the house is also really nice. This one is a 14'x32' with a man door, a window and a garage type roll up door. I really like using portable building shells and a little shopping can pick them up fairly cheap. The Cabin I live in is a 16'x48' lofted with a porch. Good size bedroom in the back, a smallish bathroom the serves the purpose, large living/dining room and a small kitchen in that odd size porch area. Taxes are much lower than a traditional structure and in some States they are not taxed at all. LOL In IL my Barns are taxed higher than my Cabin but my cabin still burns me $450 per year. The barns run $450-$650 per year for me. Basically where I am anything over 10'x10' is taxed and taxed as much as possible.......but that is a different topic What is relevant is they are a open floor plan in a shell that are easy to customize for yer specific needs or wants. I had 10 treated 2x4s left over from another project and screwed and nailed them together to make this bench. I decided not replace Grandpa's bench with this one and instead use it as the meat counter for the customers to lay their packages on while digging through the freezers. The various scales will go on the plywood piece. I will also use it as the egg grading/candling and packing table and that piece of plywood will stop any runaway eggs One of my side businesses on the farm is a Licensed and Inspected Egg Grading Station. Aside from my own eggs I can legally take in others peoples eggs, candle, grade, pack label and date them for a small fee. Which I do for a couple of the licensed egg dealers that don't want to devote 5 hours per week to that aspect of selling their eggs. They bring me 20-30 dozen eggs and I have them done and in cartons with their labels in about a hour for $15-$20 Not big money but something to do in the evenings while watching TV or listening to the radio. And I am never going to complain about a extra $60-$70 per week appearing in my pocket. And like anything the more you do something the faster and better you get at doing it. The folks I do this for were spending 4-5 hours per week candling, grading and packing..... what takes me a hour or less. So a good bench with plenty of space to stack cartons on before they go to the cooler is a must. I have benches for just about everything. From light duty like this one up to made with 4" post oak slabs for the top sitting on 6x6 post oak legs and 3" rough cut slab frames to sit 1600 pound tractor hubs on and work on them. My Massey tractor has those solid steel 1600 pound one piece hubs, front hubs only weigh 800 pounds each LOL. Don't have to pull them or work on them often......... but when I do life is much easier when they are belly level. Most of my benches are made from scrap wood I hoard here and there until I have enough to build something with. Some I mill from specific trees for specific benches. I really like post oak for anything that is going to take a beating for sit outside. The wood last forever and it takes a act of God to break it. For my oak benches I joint them together and use primarily bore, glue and wood pins to hold them together with a couple of pilot holes and lag screws for good measure. A very time consuming build that requires you to be precise on cutting the joints unless you want a wobbly bench. Grandpa's bench, I guess it was 1975 or 1975 that we built this bench. It is the first thing I remember us building together. It was also one of the few things I managed to cart off before the pissing matches got started over who gets what. LOL I snuck in loaded up the bench, his cigar box of pictures and his old double barrel damascus steel 12 gauge shotgun. That was all I wanted and what he specified he wanted me to have. After that I sat back and laughed as the vultures circled and clawed and pecked at each other. We worked on and built a lot of things on that bench from the mid 70s up until 1989 when he died. I was hammering out a bearing on it when the center cross board broke and realized just how brittle that wood had gotten over the last 44 years or so. I will fix it and clean it up and use it for a canning bench going forward, its days of things getting pounded on it are over though Shelving I also mostly build from scrap wood for the barns and dry storage. I also pick up heavy duty commercial shelving when I can find a deal on it. I have to use the Approved heavy wire shelving in the commercial kitchen, the walk in cooler and the dry food storage. Everything else wood shelving is ok And yep the building you can see out the door is the commercial kitchen, another portable building. I finished the inside of it with heavy insulation top to bottom, plywood walls with FRP and Trim glued onto the plywood and everything else required by law for a full commercial kitchen. It is only 12x32 but has plenty of room for all of the work I do in it. The big smokers are in the tin building that you can just see the edge of behind the kitchen, Two old 500 gallon steel fuel tanks I cut, hinged, put legs on and one with a big rotisserie that will hold thirty 15-20 pound pork shoulder. The second with a flat top and diamond grate for mass producing burgers, brats etc for catering. THe second also has a rotisserie but it only holds 15 pork shoulders. between the two big smokers sits a 200 gallon steel tank that is the fire and smoke chamber with dampers on the 8" pipe that goes into the bottom of both big smokers. Can keep it cool for cold smoking, up it for hot smoking or crank it up to around 700 degree if you really want to burn something. The second one can be loaded under the grate and used as a char grill. I have a catering job coming up in November that wants 36 15pound smoked pork shoulders for their party. I can load them into the rotisseries, load up the fire chamber and flip the switches for the electric motors to start the meat spinning, check and stoke the fire 4 times over 14 hours, pack the fin ished shoulders 2 to a aluminum catering pan the next morning and deliver them the mountain of garlic mashed taters, mac n cheese and coleslaw hot and really just finished cooking to the party as scheduled. Also makes a real nice chunk of change in the pocket going into winter, when jobs slow way down. The stuff you hoard and prep is only as good as the shelving and containers you store it in and on. Cheap shelving break, bends and is flimsy. And I do not mean cheap $$$ shelving, there is some real cheap junk available for A lot of $$$. But there is a pic of 22' x 7' -> 30" shelving that cost next to nothing that is rock solid and will last a lifetime. I might have $15-$20 into those shelves. Well not exactly 22 feet 8' of it is commercial heavy wire shelving that I have $75 into. Excuse the mess in the storage building and outside of it. I am doing some remodeling and turning the back 10'x14' into my new office. Everything that was in that area got sat outside and of course the last two days have been windy and promptly blew plant flats, pots and cans buckets and tent tops everywhere LOL and I can't take a picture inside a building or trailer without getting at least two freezers in the picture. I have 28 chest freezers and different ones get stuck in different places. 16 on trailers, 1 in the kitchen, 2 in the dry warehouse, 1 in the cabin, 8 in another building specific to inspected packaged pork shoulders. Pretty strict rules in this business as to where I can keep the meats stored. Like stuff for the Kitchen can't be in with the small packaged direct marketed stuff on the trailers but the stuff in the trailer freezers can go into the kitchen freezers but once there can't go back to the trailer freezers. No personal stuff or uninspected stuff in with the inspected stuff or even in the same building or trailer. Then the stuff I buy in can't be in the same freezers as the stuff I have processed under inspection........ yeah there are some real headaches that go along with all of the meat and poultry regulations and inspections.
I'm happy that you're doing/living something that you enjoy, at least most of the time. I know it's a pain and tons of labor because I read your stuff. But you seem to have it pretty well dialed and to my layman's eyes you do a stellar job of it. Just wanted to let you know.
