The Mancave
The 92 counties crew has been busy the past few months on a new project, which has kept us away from traveling recently – so it seemed only fitting to write about it all here.
As you probably know, we have an airplane. When you have an airplane, you have to keep it somewhere – typically at an aiport, and even more typically in a hangar or somewhere tied down in a parking area at that airport.
We were keeping our airplane hangared with another one in a private hangar, but this was certainly not a long term solution as it was a bit tight, and during the winter was even more tight as a number of boats, cars, etc were also shoved into that space.
The Columbus airport has a number of T-hangars available for rent, but the waiting list is about a year long, and as you can see below there isn’t an exception amount of space available in one. It’s an airplane garage, and that’s it.
Example of a T-Hangar
The hangar I had been parking my plane in is much larger, has a restroom, a small living area, and a separate bedroom. This type of luxury had spoiled me. So, I started looking into what it would take to build our own hangar on airport property.
The logistics of building a hangar are a little unusual. Generally they are just glorified pole barns, with a large door on the end for the airplane. That type of construction is pretty straightforward. However, what’s out of the ordinary is that the airport generally owns, and will always own their own property. They do not sell the land. Instead, they will allow you to lease a small lot for a long term period (40-90 years), and then you can build a hangar on it.
Because of this arrangement, the hangar building itself is viewed as personal property instead of real property, because real property, like a house, is considered affixed to the land it sits on. Since the land isn’t owned, the hangar is viewed more as a movable structure that could be relocated (in reality, that’s not the case, but in the eyes of the law/tax code, it’s the reality).
This has some benefits: you don’t pay real estate taxes on the land, and the hangar building itself is taxed as personal property and not real property. The state of Indiana also has a personal property exemption on airplane hangars (though you have to fill out an exemption form every 2 years to apply).
It also makes getting financing for buying or building a hangar very complicated, because most banks simply aren’t set up for lending money against the asset since it’s considered personal property.
As I was exploring these options, and getting my costs put together for an entire project I realized we had a pretty big task ahead of us. Having GC’d a construction project before, I knew what was going to have to be done to get this whole project completed, and I estimated it would take about 9 months from start to finish to get the structure in place. I didn’t really want to devote 9 months of my free time trying to get the project done, but I didn’t see any other choice if we did want to build a hangar.
As fate would have it, one of the current hangar owners happened to know a guy who was looking for sell his. He build it about 6 years ago, but sold his airplane 2 years ago and had just been using it for “junk” storage. He thought it might be a good time to move his junk somewhere else and get some money back on his investment. His price was right in line with my expectations, so over the course of a few weeks, paperwork was done, money was exchanged, and we now have our own hangar (mancave).
This area of the airport is known as the “Eagle’s Nest”. I am not entirely sure why.
Our motivation behind this purchase was more than just a place to keep the airplane. We also felt like it would be a great place for Isaac (and now, #2 kid) to play. The area is very safe, completely fenced and void of traffic. Inside is a wide open space to run around. This complements our current house nicely, which while is fine for us, isn’t extremely spacious. This just gives us another place to go with the kids.
Now, this hangar was in pretty basic shape. It’s 50×80, has a 45′ wide x 16′ tall door, so more than enough to hold 1 (really 3 airplanes tightly packed). Some basic plumbing fixtures were installed, but never finished out.
So the shower in the picture was never even taken out of the shrink wrap. A toilet drain, shower drain, and water well were all installed – but never utilized. The previous owned had framed in a small room as you can see in the picture above – he was using it for parts storage and some assembly line work in boxing up a product he was selling.
The location of that pre-built room was…unfortunate – it was right in the middle of the span of the building. This removed any ability to fit more than 1 airplane into the space, should that ever be desired. And while I don’t have a desire to buy another airplane (right now), I do have a desire to maximize the space of the hangar in the smartest way. This room had to go.
Luckily, it was very basic framing. The walls were not attached to the floor, just to each other, so it was pretty easy to tear apart. And tearing down walls is…fun!
So my basic project was to get a new room built. The idea here was to finish out the bathroom, and build a small office/bedroom out of the rest of the space. At first I was going to tackle this project, but it quickly became apparent my talents were not in carpentry or plumbing, so I quickly brought in an expert to do the work.
Our first two objectives were to get the basic framing in place, and get the toilet installed. Isaac helped with the toilet.
The original idea was the space above would be for storage – junk, and whatnot. And I would just use an extension ladder to get on top. However, it became evident that we had enough space up there to do something smarter than that with it, so we decided to go ahead and add framing there as well to make it into its own space/room (usage TBD). This meant we should also build a staircase.
We built the second floor landing where the stairs would go, and worked on finishing up the first floor. This included getting all of the wiring into place, putting insultion in, and putting up OSB on the exterior walls.
Stairs are difficult. My carpenter is good, but he’s not a mathematician. He told me he would cut and install the stairs, but I would have to lay them out. This is much more difficult than it sounds, as there are a lot of things you have to account for.
I laid out a stringer on a 2×12 using fancy math I learned in college, and he cut it. Of course, it was not right at all. But he found a way to finagle it enough to make it correct. Then we used that as a template to make the other stringers.
A little bit of woodworking magic, and we have a pretty solid structure.
One trick to going with the second floor is that the hangar currently has a radiant heater that runs the length of the building and hangs from the trusses. This heater gets pretty hot in the close vicinity of the radiant tube, but since it’s 14 feet in the air that’s not much of an issue – except for the small part that sits right next to this new structure. And we don’t want a hot combustable tube right next to wood.
Luckily, I used my engineering skills to solve the issue – I give you my radiant reflector.
This is just a piece of sheet insulation that has the reflective side to it – but it’s simple enough to keep the radiant heater from causing an issue on the wood structure. This radiant heater will likely get replaced in the next year or two with a more central air style heat pump system – but for this winter season this arrangement will suffice.
Thus, our final product as of today:
Of course, it needs painted, the outlets need installed, we still need to install the lid ceiling inside the rooms – but it’s very workable in its current state.
While all of the work above went on, the plumbers got their stuff installed in the bathroom.
Over the next few months I hope to get more finished on the project as time and money permits. I’ll post updates as we progress.