Garage looks great..

You got picked up as 'My Favourite Garage' on BuildThreads.com - congrats

http://www.build-threads.com/build-t...ourite-garage/

 

Can't beleive I missed this one until now. Outstanding work. Talk about efficient use of space!

And those Strong Hold cabinets....300 years from now when the house is long gone, those cabinets will still be standing there.

Your build is downright inspirational. Thanks for sharing all the details.

PS: Love the outdoor shed(s). Exceptional.

 

Very clean setup! Nice work.

 

attention to detail is great man nice garage!

 

Great looking and extremely functional garage. Thanks for sharing.

 

I love the garage and love the RSR! Tell us more about the car.

 

18 months later, he answers.

My compressor is in the crawlspace under my house. A line runs to the reel under the main work bench. I put a wood facade in front of where the reel was to make it look a little better.

Two recent additions to the garage. One is a new sink area. It used to look like this:



But then I took this old Strong Hold cabinet:



And cut it up and re-welded it together to make the lower cabinets, counter top, and upper cabinets of this:



Which cleaned up to look like this (with the upper cabinets finished and everything painted):



But then there was a bigger project. Here's the glammy video that introduces it, and also shows how it was put in.

.

Here are some pictures of it in action:







The lift cost $455, second-hand. Total cost with tool rental, concrete and new tiles was $670.

 

That's ridiculously cheap - where did you find it used?

I could use that on the Vette - but a no go my G8.

Looks awesome!

 

Yeah, it really only is ideal for a car with a flat belly pan like the 911 or an old Beetle. But I've had the one track car for 11 years now, so it's safe to say it's a common-law marriage. And $455 was about the price of a good AC floorjack, so I figured that even if I was only able to use it with the 911, it would be a not-too-stupid investment.

I have blocks I can use with it that would allow me to lift a car with low oil lines or exhaust pipes. But the nice thing about having the car sit on a 3/4" neoprene pad on top of the tiles is that the 'contact patch' between the car and the lift is enormous. It's much more stable than the other consumer-targeted garage lifts I've seen. (But then, the lift itself is designed to be used in environments where it takes hits from forklifts every day.)

I found it on ebay. The same outfit had two of them, and they were about 30 miles from my house. The first one went for $700, and I thought: that's less than a cheap Harbor Freight scissors lift, and this is an American-made piece of heavy equipment. I was surprised to see the second one go for so little. It was in as-new condition. The trick was getting it home, but I rented a truck from Home Depot ($19 for 75 minutes) and kept the thrifty theme of the whole deal intact.

3-1/2" of solid steel at the joints. It's pretty stout.



The blue looked funny when I put it in, so I sprung for a quart of color-matched acrylic to keep the green thing going.

 

How cool is that. Nice work, sweet garage. If that Porsche could only know how lucky it is....

 

Great post.

I love the originality and story behind it all. I can appreciate your need to keep everything off the floor and out of site (I'm the same way). Really enjoyed reading this.

 

Jack's quite popular over at Garage Journal. With good reason, it's a very nicely laid out and executed garage.

 

I think my low-budget garage gets attention because of what it's not -- it isn't a big-dollar warehouse filled with exotic cars that normal guys could never afford (not that there's anything wrong with that -- some of the garages on this forum are my idea of heaven).

I think it comes across as being within the grasp of an ordinary guy. Personally, I'm not rich -- so (no surprise) it was within my grasp.

Popular Mechanics just put it in their August issue, and the once-a-year 'Great Garage Makeovers' did a thing on my second-hand cabinets. Jalopnik also featured excerpts from a thing in Hemmings' blog -- it got over 47,000 views. Weird.

Here's the Popular Mechanics piece.



Then, bam! -- a picture on the contents page. Awesome.



But then, huh? They use a picture from the 'before' stack for the main article. It's the garage after I initially cleaned it up. It's a pretty enough picture, but of the four things they call out in the text below, only one even existed at the time the picture was taken. Lights made of cake pans? There are none in the picture. Consistent-height benches? None in the picture. Heavy duty metal cabinets? Not a one in the picture.

They connect the lines and numbers to, uh... pretty much random points in the picture.



Okay, but it's done. The magazine is printed. There's no changing things at this point.

Except that, you know -- I'm kind of OCD. So I get busy with Photoshop and make my own version of the page with an up-to-date picture in it. If nothing else, this is the one I can mount on a board and hang in the garage. It won't technically be what appeared in the magazine, but hey, it's my damn garage and they were using my photographs for the article. I'll take a little license.

So here's the article as I would have wanted it to appear.



Next up, Great Garage Makeovers. I think you can get it at most Lowe's and Home Depots. There are MUCH cooler garages than mine in it, there are the two pages on my green cabinets.

They contacted me long before Popular Mechanics, but have a longer publication lead time. Oddly, their pictures are more up to date than the main one Popular Mechanics used.

Still, it's odd to see my garage without the new sink area or the lift.



Finally, Jalopnik. The video clip they used instantly went from about 50 views up to over 32,000 views.




I thought I was completely done with the garage getting so much attention, but now I've heard from a magazine in Argentina and also a magazine called Garage Style.

Whoda thunk?

 

Can we see just one picture of this garage dirty!

 

No problem. This weekend a friend of mine and I are finishing up a suspension refresh and a rebuild of the engine. Here's the garage when we were just starting to put the motor back together.