Welcome To The SHRED SHED | Dan Bailey's Home Gym Tour
Dan Bailey gives a first-person tour of his home gym, the "shred shed," explaining that he converted an old barn (parts likely built 1870–1890; barn assembled around 1940s–50s) into a workout space. He describes demo work (removing lofts/walls, pouring a concrete pad), installing rough-cut lumber interior walls, adding a roll-up door, applying spray-foam insulation beneath the walls, and using infrared and an indirect-fired kerosene/diesel heater. He emphasizes maximizing open floor space and notes much of the equipment is from Rogue Fitness.
What's up, guys? I'm Dan Bailey. I'm going to give you a tour of my home gym, AKA the shred shed.
All right, here we are. You can see that from the outside it looks like just an old barn. But on the inside here, I've converted it kind of into my full home gym. A little bit about the barn is from the previous property owners. There's probably more than just one barn. Was torn down and helped build this barn that was probably put here sometime in either around the 40s and 50s. So the barns that actually made this one up were probably built sometime in 1870-1890, because that's about when the house was built as well. When I started working on the barn.
Where we're standing right now was actually like a chicken coop. And there were just a bunch of walls everywhere that kind of sectioned off different areas of kind of where we're standing. There was nothing but like two to two and a half feet of dirt and hay on the ground. Then there was actually another loft that went across the room on this side, kind of like the loft is over there. And so when I started working on it, all that had to be demoed. So everything basically had to be torn out. So that was the first thing I did, was just start tearing down walls, tearing down old wood, tearing down everything that kind of needed to be taken out. Had a concrete pad poured in here. And then I started on what's been probably one of the biggest projects is putting up the walls and replacing some old wood that were on the walls. So all of the walls that you're looking at that we now pretty much have done all of that is rough cut lumber that I got from like a local style sawmill. I wanted to keep kind of the rugged look on the inside. I didn't want to make it too polished because I like that rugged look. And it kind of matches just the vibe in here. So cut all those pieces. In between myself, my dad and a few friends, we've kind of hung all these walls in here. So one of the big problems I had at the start too, to make it kind of weatherproof or a little bit warmer in here and conceal from the elements was this big opening that has the two big sliding doors on the outside. What I wanted to go with was a roll up door, which is what we have in here. And actually my friends Pat and Christy helped me put this in here. So in order to get that whole roll up door in there, we didn't use any machines. We actually built like a Lattice staircase that kind of stepped up and had to slowly kind of like bring the whole thing up and then mount it up at the top. And then now I've got a nice chain driven, just pull up roll door. Keeps sealed out from the elements. Helps keep a little bit warmer in here. So one of the other big struggles that I was kind of dealing with was how I was going to semi insulate it. I knew that I wasn't going to insulate the whole thing just because it's a little bit big for that and that could be a little bit of a long term project. So actually underneath all of the rough cut lumber is like just a small layer of spray foam. And that actually took quite a while to get done. But once that was done, it kind of sealed out any wind from crossing from one end of the barn to the other, which also helped make it a lot more weatherproof and a lot more tolerable to work out here in the wintertime. I do have two different kind of heaters that I put in here. One is hanging above us, that's actually an infrared tube heater. And so that just kind of projects heat down. It doesn't really heat the air. And those are really nice. If you're in a garage gym space, because it's going to heat up the objects that are underneath it or next to it, it's not necessarily going to heat up the air. So even though it might be cold air in the room, you can still feel that heat kind of pushing down on you the whole time that you're either working out or warming up or anything like that. New to this year, I also purchased a kerosene or diesel indirect fired heater. And the difference with these than like the torpedo ones you see kind of in a lot of garages is this one actually just blows clean air into the room and it exhausts the diesel or fumes out the top so you don't have to worry about like choking on kerosene fumes while you're working out. It's also portable so I can move it around. I've got it mounted here if I want to, but if I need to take it off site for any reason or I want to move it to a different side of the barn, I can do that. It's also nice that it stays out there. It doesn't take up any room or space inside my workout area. So my vision for the setup was to have a as much available floor space as possible. So when buying equipment, that was what I kept trying to keep in Mind is how can I move and store equipment that I need in here in the right way to have plenty of floor space available. Now, the one thing that does take up a lot of floor space, actually this lat pull down. Pretty much everything in here or everything in here was supplied by Rogue Fitness.
This did fit that mold, but everybody's got. If you have an option to have a lat pull down or a cable pull down, it a different kind of challenge. It makes the muscle ups or any kind of ring work a little bit more difficult, which is kind of what I like. That's usually the standard that we had to use when we competed in the CrossFit Games or any other competition, usually run into long straps. So it's a good thing to have and a good thing to practice on. Rowers are an essential machine that I like. One of the total body, low impact things you can do, or monostructural or cardio kind of things you can do is just on a Concept 2 rower. So a big fan of those. One of these was actually the rower that I had out on my boat, and it still works just fine. I lived on a boat back in like 2014 for like a year and a half or two years, so I've still got that same one. That's got some sentimental value, for sure. But rowers, an air runner in here for when it's cold and running outside is just not ideal. That was an essential, even though it's a little bit of a bigger ticket item. And then the Echo bike for sure is just kind of a torture device. I mean, the Devil's tricycle, whatever you want to call it. I've got a couple of those for different clients who come in here. It's kind of a fan favorite. You know, everybody kind of groans and gets really upset when you pull out the Echo bike, but at the end of the day, they love it. They love working out on it. So up above, we've got this loft, which is actually just a storage area right now. But as I kind of progress through getting everything done on the gym space, I want to make this loft more of a hangout area. So go check that out. So even though things look pretty cluttered up here, like I said, it's just kind of for storage right now. At some point I want to have some TVs up here so it can be a place where you can kind of relax, hang out. I would love to have some kind of sauna up here or a cold tub for after clients work out or after I Work out to kind of use that or utilize that, enjoy it. But that's actually going to come second to any of the actual work that needs to happen down on the floor. So finishing everything down on the floor is kind of the first thing that needs to happen. All right, so this actually used to be a wall right here where this loft ended. I had that walled off, thinking that this was going to be enough room for everything that I wanted to do, and it definitely wasn't. This place got super cluttered. Like I mentioned before, I'm a big fan of just open floor space, and I wasn't having that, so had to re tear down this wall that I built with a couple friends of mine and poured a concrete pad over there. That was actually the first concrete pad I ever poured with a couple buddies of mine. They came over and helped out. And so now this is going to be more of a storage space where the bikes, the air runner, all those things can kind of be under here in their own lanes so that they can be easily pulled out onto the floor and used when they need to be, but then rolled back underneath when you don't need them to keep the floor space nice, free and clear. I mean, right now, it's still pretty cluttered. It's a little bit dirty. It's kind of a workshop. It's where I keep a lot of tools because I still need a lot of tools to work on a lot of stuff here. So when I come in and want to do some work, it's all there, ready to go. So I'm getting closer to the point where I can just kind of keep everything under here, and it can serve the purpose that it's meant to. So not quite there yet, but that's just one more thing that's on the list. So another future project that I'm looking forward to doing is actually the outside area. So outside this door, I kind of had to take down a bunch of brush, and it's still a little bit of a mess out there, But I want to eventually make that an area for strongman activities. So things like heavy stones, the yolk, big dumbbells, things like that, and kind of like a sand pit out there is kind of the idea. So I'll probably have some kind of rig out there, and then all that strongman activity stuff can happen specifically in the south summertime outside. So that's pretty much it. If you guys are interested in the progress that I'm making on here, you can head over to my own YouTube channel. I'm always posting updates on the barn, kind of information on how I've done some of the things that I've done, why I've done what I've done, and how you can also build out your own home gym and how you might need to solve some of those problems you're going to run into doing that. One thing you need to realize it's just going to be a lot of hard work and you just got to take it one day at a time. But right now, this is my gym and I put a lot of work into here, and it's time for me to do a little working out. And time for you guys to go. Thanks for coming by the barn. We'll see you later.
