Building a car showroom from scratch - this is INSANE

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]All right, guys. Welcome to part one of building my dream workshop series. As you guys know, I have my shop here, which is in absolute shambles right now because I'm getting ready to move into a new shop. I'm super pumped about it. A lot of you people know that I have owned a music studio for the last 16 years.

[00:00:21]It's been in business for 30 years.

[00:00:23]Since 1996, we've been in business. I've owned it since 2010. That is 16 years I've owned the place and I made the decision that it's now time to get rid of that business and move my car warehouse and all of my offices into that building because it's my building.

[00:00:39]Long story short, this shop I'm standing in right now is 17,800ish ft² and I have super super overgrown it.

[00:00:47]My other building is 6,000 square ft. I have no neighbors here. I got neighbors on both sides. It is a freestanding building with its own private lot. And I'm not going to lie, the building, it's old. So, we're going to redo it in this and I'm going to build my ultimate man cave/car showroom slash office and just fantasy factory. So, come along with me on this. It's something a little bit different on the channel, but it's going to be a lot of fun and I'm excited to take you guys along on the project with me. And yeah, I don't know. Long story short, let's just go get into it. All right, the boys have been hard at work back here. Look at this.

[00:01:30]So, one of the big problems we had, there was a tree here and we had some pretty strong winds not that long ago and the tree got blown over by the wind and it took the whole fence with it here. So, now the boys are taking everything out and that's what's going down. This is insane. The boys are just they're getting it done. They are getting it done. So, this is my beautiful building here. That's my party bus. You guys haven't seen this on the channel. It is filthy right now. I'll show you guys the inside. I haven't taken it out in a while.

[00:02:05]It's super dirty on the inside, but let's go in and take a look at my party bus.

[00:02:09]All right. So, this bus is not owned by Happy Dad. This is my bus, but I'm uh one of the partners of Happy Dad. So, of course, I wrapped my bus. Check it out. Woo! Dusty as hell in here. This is the VIP room here in the back. You guys kind of see it's a little dark. Let's see if my phone will lighten that up a little bit.

[00:02:31]No, not really working.

[00:02:34]Anyway, size the VIP room. Seating for about 10 back there. Come up front. Get another stripper pull. Got a bar here.

[00:02:44]Another bar there. Big old monster TV.

[00:02:47]This thing's got a 10,000 watt stereo system in it. Another bar back here. You kind of see a couple more TVs, but let's see. Another stripper pole. More chair.

[00:02:57]Seating. Again, it's filthy in here.

[00:03:00]It's like super dirty.

[00:03:02]Um, we haven't used this thing in about probably eight or nine months, but this thing is the most fun thing absolutely ever. So fun. We rip on this thing. Good morning.

[00:03:15]It is Monday, I think April 6th or something along those lines. The guys are already at my other building hacking out walls, cutting up the concrete. I've already been over there like two or three times. I forgot the GoPro at the shop earlier. So, um, Gear Down headquarters version 3.0 is under way and I could not be more excited. This is so awesome. ripping around a little mini Cooper today, you know, little daily driver action. But, um, yeah, this is super good. I'm gonna put, uh, a quick little picture right here. This is me in my very first shop that I opened back in gosh, just probably 2008, 2009, something like that. Little tiny shop, 1,000 ft. But it's literally where I got my start. And it's just, it's kind of insane that um, it's all come down to this. And now I'm spending tens of thousands of dollars just on demolition and uh putting a new fence up in the parking lot. It's insane. But let's go check it out. We're almost here.

[00:04:22]Of course, my bus is absolutely disgustingly filthy. Oh my gosh, look at this. These guys already have massive holes cut over here.

[00:04:32]I can't believe it. This is insane.

[00:04:34]Let's check it out.

[00:04:37]Damn, you guys work fast, bro.

[00:04:42]>> Hey, that's kind of crazy that you guys could um cut that kind of [ __ ] >> The demo boys going over here right now.

[00:04:49]Just hauling everything out. These guys are getting ready to put in a big old motorized track right there. And we're finally getting a proper fence cuz this thing is [ __ ] cooked, guys. It's absolutely cooked.

[00:05:05]Good.

[00:05:06]>> All right, bro. Thank you.

[00:05:08]>> So, uh, but yeah, we're finally going to get a fence. Like, these guys are proper over here. I don't know if you guys see that little yellow sign says 7,000 volts. That's an electric fence. I would love to do that, but to I don't even know how much it costs to put an electric fence on us on a building. But, um, luckily, since we're just replacing what's already here, we don't have to deal with too much, thankfully. Um, but we're going to get fresh crazy razor wire from here all the way down back there. And it's going to be really good.

[00:05:37]I got to get rid of this old shipping container. As a matter of fact, I don't even know what's inside of this thing. And I lost the key. So, I'm going to have to go and get I have to go get some bolt cutters or get my angle grinder to cut that off cuz I don't even know what the hell's in here. So, we're going to figure that out today, too.

[00:06:02]All right, I bought this parasel boat eight years ago and it's time to send her off to a new home. She's out of here. Okay, the boat is gone. The jet skis are leaving tonight or tomorrow.

[00:06:15]The problem I have right now is that the demo guys and my HVAC and my electrician, they're all going to need a scissor lift. And this project is probably going to be a couple of months.

[00:06:29]to rent a scissor lift is like 200 bucks a day, but I found one for sale for three grand from uh US Rentals or United Rentals right up the street from my shop here. So, I'm just going to go over there and I'm going to buy one and we're going to use it for this job and then when I'm done with the job, either we'll sell it or I'll keep it cuz scissor lifts are always good to have, especially when you have 20 plus foot high warehouse ceilings. Um, I know that every single person on this project that's going to be doing stuff in this building is gonna need the scissor lift.

[00:07:00]Holy [ __ ] Crazy ass accident.

[00:07:04]I thought I thought the lady on the bike got hit. Guess she didn't. But um but yeah, so that's what I'm heading to do right now. Going to go I The crazy thing is I don't know anything about scissor lifts. Um, but since I'm not buying it from like a random person, cuz I was looking on on Marketplace, which I have an addiction now to Marketplace, but since I'm not buying it from a person, I'm buying it from United Rentals. They only accept credit cards as payment, which is sick. So, if this thing's a lemon, American Express has my back. So, let's go buy a scissor lip. The other thing, sorry I know I'm like ranting about this stupid scissor lip, but because it's coming from United Rentals, their pricing is actually cheaper than all the other ones on marketplace.

[00:07:46]Everybody else on marketplace wants 35 to45 to $7,000. All the ones that I've looked at and I'm getting this one for three grand. So, I'm ahead. I think I'm going to be able to sell it for 3500 bucks. So, I'm done. Get my guys out there to clean it, make it look all nice and shiny. Supercharge batteries. just have this thing dialed in and next thing you know, we're getting paid. We'll make some money back on this thing. Who knows? But about to pull into United Rentals and get this sucker. Let's do it. Oh, and the best part about United Rentals, since it's only two blocks away or three blocks away, um they're going to deliver it for free. I don't even have to I don't have to rent the trailer. I don't got to load it. I don't do [ __ ] They're going to bring it to me. How [ __ ] cool is that? Life is good. Life is good.

[00:08:30]I've remodeled a bunch of houses, but never a commercial building before. And somehow or another, we made it.

[00:08:39]All right, I'm here at United Rentals. I have no idea what I'm You know what? I'm going to watch a video on YouTube real quick about what to look for when buying a scissor lift.

[00:08:50]All right, guys. So, that was it right there. That's my boy Roy. Here's a quick little tip for you guys. Quick little tip. When you buy stuff like this, the guy that brought it out, I tipped him 20 bucks. I said, "Yo, make sure this thing's dialed." He said, "I got you. No problem." He's going to go in the back, put brand new batteries in it, make sure it's fully charged before they deliver it to me. Life is good. All for 20 bucks. Cuz these guys don't care. This is corporate. This is corporate America BS. So, United Rentals. Shout out to Roy hooking me up with some brand new batteries. He can make sure this thing's good to go.

[00:09:22]All right, guys. That's it. Just bought a scissor lift.

[00:09:29]Uh, okay. So, I just gave you guys a positive about buying from corporate, but the crappy thing about buying from corporate is sales tax. So, total the unit was $3,000.

[00:09:40]$232.50 for sales tax. So, total out the door $3,232.50.

[00:09:48]We bought a scissor lift, baby. This is so freaking awesome.

[00:09:53]Getting delivered. Today's Monday.

[00:09:55]They're delivering it on Wednesday. So, let's go check in on the crew and let the demo guys know that uh the scissor lift will be there on Wednesday for them.

[00:10:06]Fence is going up. That's what I'm talking about. We are making progress.

[00:10:13]Let's take a quick little peek inside.

[00:10:15]Oh, look at that. She's all getting cleaned out.

[00:10:44]All right, new scissor lift is here.

[00:10:48]Driver is lazy though. doesn't want to take you to the back and warehouse, which sucks.

[00:11:14]>> All right, guys. Progress is being made.

[00:11:18]Fence is good. These guys are really tearing this all up, which is We're getting there. I'll come in the back, show you guys what I'm working on.

[00:11:37]I'm back up here getting the privacy screen on the fence here, which if you've ever done this, you know this is a colossal pain in the ass, especially if it's windy. It calmed down a little bit, but it was blowing pretty good earlier, but that's kind of what we're looking at looking like back here right now. So, it's crazy.

[00:12:00]We're getting there. It's a lot of work, but I think by Friday, today's Wednesday, I think two more days, these guys are going to have the entire inside of this building just chopped out of here. We should be good. So, shout out to them. All right, let's get back after it.

[00:12:26]All right, guys. Welcome back to the project. See, I got my G Wagon behind me for size reference.

[00:12:33]This place is so massive and we have it very much so cleaned out. So, I think we're starting to come up with the layout right here. This area back in here is going to be my gym. So, I figure um a weight rack. Weight rack probably over here on this side. Then we'll do cold plunge that way. And then an infrared sauna right there. I don't know where I'm going to put a hyperaric chamber. I'm thinking we're probably going to build a mezzanine right here where this is up to this top of the ceiling line. I think I'm going to do a mezzanine here. That's a pretty decent size right there for a mezzanine. I can throw a hyper barrack up there and a little bit of light storage. Come back over here. We could see more. This wall here, this is staying. I haven't decided what I'm going to do with this hallway yet up here. It's going to be a little dark in here. Kind of hard to see, but um yeah. So, anyways, this hallway is going to stay.

[00:13:33]This the bathroom in there. That'll stay.

[00:13:37]I've had the boys have ripped out this whole wall. So this here the plan is I think this is about 26 27 ft along this span. I'm going to do an all glass wall right here. We'll add a door into this wall and this will be like conference room. Um just sl you know just hangout spot. TV up on the wall and stuff and nice glass wall where you can see out and see all the cars looping around up here. This wall and this ceiling will be coming out uh hopefully at the end of this week. These guys are supposed to be moved out of this room by this weekend.

[00:14:16]And you can see from there to the end, I've got about 17 more feet to the corner on that side. This rollup door is 12T.

[00:14:25]So, we're moving along. Um, I've got estimates in from HVAC to bring those up flush and then just do one big pipe across. I have another unit up there which is going to do the same. We have a ton of cooling in the shop which is unheard of for Southern California. I mean, Southern California warehouses are never air conditioned and all of my warehouse and office space will be fully air conditioned in here. Got a crazy quote to do insulation uh up on the ceiling. Uh the roof insulation, the quote came in for that about $17,000.

[00:15:02]So, I'm probably not going to do that.

[00:15:04]What I'm going to do is just have my guys get up here and replace all the missing uh radiant barrier. And then when the painter gets in here, they are going to um they'll just spray it all black. But like 100% this is like the most fun thing I've ever bought. I love the scissor lift.

[00:15:21]My workers left a bunch of [ __ ] up here.

[00:15:23]But check this out. Go like this. Here we go. Elevator going up. Oh, wait. We got to do that one. And now we're going up, boys.

[00:15:39]So, you guys can see how much office space we have up there. Goes all the way back. I don't know if I want to tear all that out and start fresh up there. It's This is getting really expensive really, really quickly. So, I may just leave this. I'm definitely, regardless of whether we leave this or we don't leave this, uh, my guys are going to be building a wall up right here and going straight to the ceiling. So, you don't see any of the um the mechanical stuff, the AC lines going to the offices up front.

[00:16:08]And then obviously right here, this will all be gone all the way back. You can't see the back corner over there. Let's move this into drive mode. Make sure we're not going to run anything over.

[00:16:17]And let's go this way. Or maybe not. Oh, maybe it won't let me drive because I'm up here.

[00:16:25]Oh, okay. Learning how to work my own equipment. I wonder if there's a limit as to how high this can be to drive.

[00:16:33]Okay, let's try this.

[00:16:36]Oh, yeah. Just cuz we were at we're at full bore there. So, let's go down.

[00:16:41]Let's see where the wheels are at.

[00:16:50]This thing, although it's fun, it is kind of sketchy, not gonna lie.

[00:16:57]And you really got to be gentle. So now you guys can see we got the back corner all the way back over there and it's just a massive building. Span is I think just under 80 ft. So I think it's like 79 and change. And um the shop space essentially is going to be Oh, wrong button. The shop space is going to be 79 or call we'll just call it 80x 40 or 78x40. And that's going to be the area to park cars. Have the gym. A nice uh nice little showcase in here. It's going to look really good. My guys do have to come over here. There's a ton of my snack machine. I'm letting them have that. All of this old soundboard. The guys are going to come in here. They got to scrape all this off, which is going to suck. Get that all ready for paint.

[00:17:45]And then we're going to do the floors.

[00:17:47]It's going to be a um crazy grinding and polishing. Um and then we'll stain it, make it look really nice. I've done epoxy in other units. You guys see in my current unit right now, the epoxy looks good for about the first 6 months and then when stuff scratches it, which inevitably is going to happen, it is impossible to touch it up and have it look right without looking like there's a big patch there. So, in this building, I think we're just going to go polish and grinded concrete floors and uh yeah, try to get that out of the way out here. Got the motorized gate in finally. All the fencing is done in the back. My boys are taking the 20ft cube out of there. That's going to go. And we got this big, beautiful gate, which is awesome. Closes right up. Still got my Happy Dad bus right here, which is absolutely filthy. We'll get this thing detailed up here pretty soon.

[00:18:40]And uh yeah, it's been a it's been a lot of fun. I'm not going to lie to you. Uh it's expensive. It's a lot of work. I've been here doing a lot of the work myself as well in, you know, in conjunction with my team, but I mean, we're really getting there. And um you got to figure today's the 15th. We are only 15 days into this and 75% of the building is out. And the cool thing is I'm not really building anything new in here. We're literally just removing stuff. We could be moving a lot faster, but I like I said, I have two studios that are still occupied. And um so it is what it is for that. But I'm really not building anything in here with the exception of a glass wall that's going right here. Everything else is basically cosmetic and HVAC ducting.

[00:19:28]So this once we get everything out of here, this is going to start moving really, really fast. And then comes the part of trying to figure out how I'm going to fill this place up, what I'm going to fill it up with, how many lifts I'm going to do, where I'm going to put them. I do want to keep it pretty millennial gray in here cuz that's just all my cars are kind of dramatic and that's just how I want to keep it. I mean, my G Wagon looks absolutely tiny in this place. Like, look at that.

[00:19:58]I'm not on a wide angle lens either. I'm on a normal lens. And dude, this thing is just like it looks tiny in here. So anyways, if you guys have any or if you guys know anybody or you are a uh kind of like a commercial like a shop uh designer or I don't know, architect, whatever that's called, hit me in the comments. Tell me what you think I should do, what the layout should be.

[00:20:18]I've been watching a ton of YouTube videos um about garage buildouts and um you know, like barn dominion buildouts and I want to do some. Obviously, we're going to go very high scale in here.

[00:20:28]needed to look really [ __ ] and really awesome. Super clean, super chic, very modern. I haven't figured out what I want to do with lighting. We're 100% not doing hex lighting because that [ __ ] is so outdated. And um yeah, I don't know what I'm going to do with lighting. I know that I want a ton of light, but also due to the size of the shop, I think I want my lighting on four separate circuits because sometimes you don't want all the light. Case in point, when I'm in here making videos like this, I don't want to be just like having to tone down white balance on bright light like that. So, it'd be nice to light up just areas of the shop that I'm at, or if I want full bright, we can do that, too. I I think I'm going to buy a dry ice blasting machine. I might put in a twoost lift in the parking lot to do dry ice blasting out there, cuz that would be nice to have all my undercarriages looking as good as the outside, the exteriors of my cars, and maybe possibly offer it as a service.

[00:21:19]Um, it would be nice to offset some bills around here. Maybe we do ice blast one car a month or something like that.

[00:21:24]It's not that expensive to get set up because I am buying a screw compressor as it is for this place cuz with a shop this big, you need a big time air compressor and we got big power here so that that won't be a problem. Um, but yeah, let me know in the comments what you think about the ice blasting idea.

[00:21:40]Um, there's only a couple providers here in my area and they char dude they charge so much money. I try to get a quote to get one of my E36s done and it was like $2500.

[00:21:51]So, I mean, dude, if I do one or two of those a month, or even if I hire somebody to come over here and do one or two of those a month, I'd be up. So, let me know in the comments what you think.

[00:22:00]I'm going to wrap this one up right here cuz this is literally phase one of my new dream workshop makeover. And the boys are just killing it. They're at the dump right now. They one of the trucks they they're at at the uh at the dump getting [ __ ] out of here. So, let me know what you guys think in the comments. I will see you guys on the next update hopefully in another week or two. Thanks for coming along on this one. Again, tell me I'm an idiot. Tell me how what a stupid idea this is in that if I get a shop this big, all I'm going to do is fill it with more and more cars, which I probably can't afford. Like Steve will do. It says, "I'm in the midst of a financial crisis, but here we are." All right. Talk to you guys soon. Peace.