I built an RV-14. From ordering the first kit to making the first flight was 38 months. I cheated a bit by ordering the empennage kit back when the lead time was measured in days, early 2018. I was almost never waiting on parts. I built in three locations:
1. My unfinished, walk-out basement was the primary workshop. The temperature was always good and it was very convenient. I could come home from work and, if I had even 15 minutes to kill, I could get something done on the plane. Working a little bit every day is better than putting in infrequent marathon sessions. You don't dread the work and you never lose track of what you wanted to do next. With the entire basement available, I wasn't constrained for space, but I did most of the work in an 18x28 area, which was more than enough. I primed parts in another corner of the basement, mostly for convenience. I had to use a nontoxic primer due to lack of ventilation separate from where I live, but that's not a problem. I also used another part of the basement to store completed wings and whatnot. I could as easily have stored those off-site. I got the empennage and fuselage built and mated, built the canopy, put the plane on landing gear, and mounted the engine in the basement. I also built the wings (with flaps and ailerons) and the tail surfaces (and rigged the elevators and rudder) here. Before I did anything on the plane, I had an electrician add a sub breaker box for me. Then I wired two circuits: A bunch of outlets at countertop height through the space I was going to build and about a half dozen ceiling outlets for overhead fluorescent lights (I'd use LEDs now). I built a pair of "EAA" workbenches. Add a decent air compressor and some cheap shelving and it's a pretty good workspace. I had an old LCD TV and cheap surround sound system that I set up to have music while I built. I looked at some pictures to get the dates right in making this post and reminisced a bit about the good old days of my dog curling up nearby while the sound of the rivet gun lulled her to sleep.
2. One stall of my 3-car garage. I rolled the fuselage (including engine and canopy but without propeller or tail feathers) up the hill and into the garage after about 22 months of building. My garage is "heated" but barely gets above freezing in the depth of winter, so this was not an ideal build location. But there are some critical paths involved and I didn't want to move anything to the airport prematurely. The propeller wouldn't fit through the basement door, so I mounted that and built the spinner in the garage. The cowl can't go on until the propeller is on (unless you want to waste time building some mock-up parts to do these steps backwards), so the garage ended up seeing a lot of fiberglass work. I also started wiring the panel while the plane was in the garage, which was a mistake but not a deal breaker. It just would have been easier to run wires with the area behind the panel open, at a lower height, and parallel to the ground rather than lying on my back on an incline under the panel.
3. A heated hangar at the airport. The move here happened after about 33 months of building. Final assembly consisted of attaching the wings (very easy on the RV-14), re-attaching the tail feathers (removed to get out of the basement a year earlier), wiring and plumbing the wings (lights, autopilot servo, fuel, pitot/AOA), and building the wingtips and some other bits and bobs.
My project was a success in just over 3 years for a variety of reasons. I won't go into them here. But, at the end of the day, building an airplane hinges a lot more on your personality than on the size of your workspace. And the RV-14 is a great plane both to build and to fly.
