Welcome To My New Screen Print Shop!
It finally fucking happened, I’m in my new shop! It’s been a crazy long road to get here with numerous obstacles but the wait is over. You guys already know that for the last 3 years I’ve been printing out of my little basement shop. Building up that little shop was a huge undertaking and a huge risk, but it was a next level home shop that hadn’t really been done by anyone before and it took me very far in this industry. What you don’t know about it is that I needed much more space for about 2.5 years of that time. Business picked up quick and before I knew it my clean and neatly organized little basement shop was overflowing with stuff on a regular basis, I can’t even begin to count how many times I destroyed my knees, shins and toes tripping over shit in there. I had a lot of off-camera rage moments. Plus with it being inside of my house it didn’t really give me the option to hire any help with printing which is something I sorely needed. The thing holding me back from moving a lot sooner was I didn’t want to lease, I wanted to own. Throwing $3000-$5000 a month at a building that was never going to be mine was something I could never get on board with, for that cost I could own something awesome. So that’s what I set out to do.
I looked for commercial property for a few months and nothing really came up that was suitable to the business or my bank account. Then it popped into my head “dude, just do a bigger and better home print shop”. I loved my little home shop, being able to work or be creative any time I wanted to without any sort of blocks has been so great for the past 3 years, and anytime you can make your workflow more efficient it’s going to pay off. So with that decision made I needed to find a new house, something with a large amount of land to build a shop on, or something with an existing shop on it. That process took a few more months. A few places came up along the way that would have been perfect, but those ended in lost bidding wars and disappointment. I was super bummed by the end of it and ready to give up, but then one more place came up. It had 5 acres of land, it was in the exact location I wanted, but it needed a lot of work. I thought about it for maybe 30 seconds and said “fuck it, let’s do it. I’m not going to get any further in this basement”. The deal was done in a short time and I was now the new owner of a 15 month long project.
This place went up in the 80’s and hadn’t been updated since, so it needed a ton of both functional and cosmetic upgrades. I also decided to buy a huge project property right in the middle of massive global shut downs and product shortages, making it that much more fun to get these things done. But thanks to a lot of family and friends, we pushed on and knocked it out. The house was gutted down to the studs in a lot of areas and completely rebuild to the way I saw it in my head, which I have to say feels pretty amazing. I look around inside and know that this is me, and it felt like home pretty quickly even after living in the same house for the last 12 years. The shop was super rough inside and out as it was never really taken care of. It needed water, power, furnace, a/c, lighting and so much more just to make it useable. Not to mention the 100 other things that it needed along the way. Once the interiors of both buildings were done, it was summer time again and it was time to work on the outside. Both the house and shop got a sick looking matte black makeover which is something I always dreamed of having, it looks so damn cool from anywhere you look and there hasn’t been a single person driving by that didn’t slow down to look. I also learned that having black buildings will bring out armies of dipshit’s who don’t understand how insulation works, so that was neat. Once that was done it was all capped off with a huge blacked out fence, and some fresh gravel and concrete to make the drive in a little bit more pleasant.
I know I made that sound kind of short but if I sat here typing out everything that happened to this place over the past year I’d probably have a novel by the end of it, and nobody wants to listen to my ass talk for that long. The real crazy thing here is this is only stage 1 of the whole project. I needed to get the essentials out of the way first so that I could move in and get to work, but there are still a few more really big stages that are going to happen over the next year that will really make this place like nothing anyone has ever seen before. You’ll have to follow along to find out what those are.
A huge thank you goes out to all of the family and friends that helped with this gigantic project. They really embraced the “put in the fucking work” motto and I definitely wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for them. Another thank you goes out to all of my clients, subscribers, sponsors, and fans for their support over the past 3 years, you are reason that I was even able to attempt something like this in the first place. (Wheelie says thanks to everyone too, he loves it here).
But now it’s time for me to do my part. Rogue Lab was able to go pretty far in 3 years from a tiny little basement, let’s see where we can go now.
