New Garage for an Old Garage Guy

I’ve always wanted the same Garajmahal that you probably do. You know, about 800 square feet (at least four cars worth) and some room for my rollaway toolbox, shelving, workbench and maybe a big conversation pit couch with at least a 72-inch TV. All perhaps with a thousand square foot house attached.

As my wife and I decided to leave our previous home of more than 30 years, it became more and more real to me that my Mini-Jay-Leno’s-Garage wasn’t going to happen. We ultimately settled on new construction in a gated community in a rural Ventura County ’burb called Camarillo; just South of Ventura, and not 100 miles from Santa Barbara. Our house-to-be was still a dirt lot when we signed on for it, so we got to select things such as all the flooring, cabinets, countertops, and a bunch of other offered choices and optional upgrades – none of which included even a three-car garage or any other creative parking options.

Check out the follow-along notes, transcript and more details for this episode at GTM

No matter, the new two-car was slightly oversized (not enough for another car) yet with a handy bump-out window area that would absorb my tool chests and workbench, and adequate walk-around-the-cars room. The walls and ceiling are insulated, drywalled, finished, and painted. Plenty of electricity. Water. Adequate built-in LED lighting. A fancy door opener you can fly with your phone. And a fresh, new, crack and oil stain free concrete floor that would make the perfect surface on which to install the SwissTrax floor from my previous house. My somewhat biggest challenge would be storage, as the new space didn’t have the rather massive overhead storage rack that I built in my old garage, nor the 7-foot tall, wall-to-wall bookcases for my something like 1,000 automotive book collection, and well over 10,000 magazine library. So, storage was the first issue that needed to be addressed in my mind.

After a lot of measuring, and many sheets of graph paper, I figured out that I could take all of my easily moveable book cases, and metal storage shelves with me, and augment them with a couple of large garage “closet” type structures from the ACE hardware. Plus, I got rid of a ton of stuff, always a healthy process, no matter if you’re moving or not.

The first order of bidness in the soon-to-be-former garage, besides all of the load-lightening, trashing, dumping, donating, and garage sale-ing was to pull up the all black SwissTrax floor, clean it, and box it for relo. So, over a weekend, me my long-suffering wife and I pulled up the entire floor, power washed it, dried it, and packed it into a dozen or so, four-foot-tall moving boxes. Just a few days after construction was complete, and our new escrow closed, we schlepped all of it to the new house, and in a process somewhat resembling a 440 sq. ft. game of Lego blocks, it was trimmed to fit, snapped together, and now covered every millimeter of the new garage floor surface. Next up was to move all of the shelving, closets, racks, containers, and garage fridge out to the new place, although the big closets from ACE were delivered directly there. Again, after a lot of measuring, and pushing and grunting all this stuff around from wall to wall to wall, it all mostly fit, and looked pretty good. If you want to lose 15-20 pounds, do this!

As you can see from these photos, I’ve stuffed at least 50 pounds of rocks in the proverbial five-pound bag, but I generally know where everything is, and although crowded, is relatively neat. Best of all, it’s clean, stays warm or cool as needed, and is just the place to rub on my cars, and hang a little car art.

Room for that third and fourth car? Only if they’re 1/43:1 scale. And the mancave couch, bar, and entertainment system. Ditto.

But hey, I know people that make do with single carports, so I’m not complainin’.