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That's nice. The best one I ever saw is this one:
When I grow up, I want to be Jack Olsen.
I thought you were giving this up?
A nice, plain hole to park your Bimmer and motorcycle. THAT’s what you need, dude.
"...My budget for the whole thing -- benches, cabinets, tile, even the lift -- was under $3,500..."
So he paid for the whole thing by skipping three oil changes at the dealer.
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too organized, how do find anything
My set up.
where is the lawn mower, the snow blower, all the garden equipment, garbage cans etc?? I guess you need a separate storage shed for all that stuff if you're going to have a garage that's clean
Don’t you guys have rakes, shovels, ladders, lawnmowers, snowblowers, ect? Lol
I did some cleaning up of my garage while in quarantine. The floor will be next but I need to do flooring in tha house first. 
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I'm jealous ! No way I can get a car in my garage ! I keep telling my wife that our next home has to have a 30 X 60 garage. I don't think I can get another thing in my garage. I do have heat and A/C in it though and a trap door in the ceiling where there is an electric hoist to raise and store our bikes. I would love to have three 16ft wide and 10ft high rollup doors to each of my passions. Woodworking, metalworking and Paint/other. Walls and ceiling would be 3/4" plywood covered with 1/2"drywall, floor would have carbide impregnated hard fired terra-cotta tile in two colors.
The refrigerator below is available at Home Depot out here and I want one for the garage. They come in 3 colors. Very retro in red !
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My garage isn't all that pretty. My Grandfather built it in 1950. It has a low ceiling of 7'.
18.5' square inside.
But I insulated and put white paneling on the ceiling and have plenty of light. Also, heat and A/C. And a HF 4' high scissor lift and a ceiling-mounted chain-hoist. I fit the BMW bike in there and a workbench, table, and of course a single car, either the Spyder or the Cayman.
All the lawn equipment goes in the shed, absolutely not in the garage.
I wish I had more (head)room, but don't we all?
I'd rather have a crappy garage and a nice car.
Of course, if I had the money, and mostly the will, I'd fix up the garage. I at least painted the walls and trimmed the windows and doors.
Danny those ramps look like a really good idea. I might steel that from you to leave my quickjack parked under my car and more easily accessible. Storage becomes an issue with jacks at times.
I also built some ramps from some scrap 2x10s. I can get the Spyder high enough to work under the front beam or oil change without using a jack.
Danny, you could probably get the Cayman and Spyder in that space if you really had to, like during a storm.
At least your kayak lives inside. Mine lives outside under a tarp. Luckily it's a plastic boat too. My next kayak will be wood, and it'll live inside.
We had a 2-car, 24' square garage build by Carefree Small Buildings in Connecticut. Fabulous outfit. After the foundation was installed and cured, the entire garage went up in 3 days. I wired it, insulated it, dry-walled it and had the ceiling rough plastered. Don't have heat or A/C (would love both) but it's OK for me. When we left South Carolina I had two shops worth of "stuff" which got combined here so it's like "Tools-R-Us" but could still use a taller lift. I store my quick-Jack under the speedster without issue. Saves a lot of setup time.
So it's not quite the "Garage-Mahal", but it's comfy and I can do an awful lot out there.
Upgrades for this winter are 4 more LED light strips in the back near the doors, surge protect AFI/GFI the entire garage (not just the outlets) and think a little more about getting affordable heat out there. Still........Itza comfy kinda place for me.
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If you heated and cooled that, you'd never want to leave it, Gordon. 24 ft x 24 ft is less than 600 sq ft. Using the old-school rules of thumb, that's about 30,000 btu/hr of heat and 18,000 btu/hr (1-1/2 ton) of A/C. A hotel room unit (PTAC) would do it all.
... a mini-split heat pump would be nicer, and a split-system furnace and A/C nicer yet. Probably the most bang for the buck is a Modine "Hot Dog" 40,000 btu/hr unit heater and a window-shaker A/C unit stubbed through the wall.
It's been 40 years since I didn't have heat in a garage, and I'm afraid I've been sissified. I've had a separate A/C unit in mine for the past 4 years and I'm not sure how I'd ever go back. It's like power windows and cruise control in a work-truck-- once you have 'em, you can't go back.
Yeah, I know. I've looked at the Modine heaters from time to time, but that's the easy part (as we've discussed on here before). It would be best to run it on LNG from the street, but getting the line run back there would be an arm and a leg (already looked into it). Propane would be the easiest with one of those 5' tall tanks (80-100 pounder?) but that's pretty expensive to run.
OTOH, one of my lacks of forethought when wiring the garage was only going to 120 volts so a 220 volt A/C system is a non-starter and a window unit, while nice, might be taxing on the system. I'll ask the electrician when he installs the transfer switch for us in the coming weeks. Maybe I can just bury another wire or two to get me to 220 out there? Maybe even run the new generator from there instead of just outside of the house.... The possibilities are truly endless!
@IaM-Ray posted:Danny those ramps look like a really good idea. I might steel that from you to leave my quickjack parked under my car and more easily accessible. Storage becomes an issue with jacks at times.
No problem. I used the 1/2" ply from the crate the jack came in, and shaved some 2 x 3(actually 1.5 x 2.5) lumber to make the ramps 2" high, same as my scales. Now I have a take-apart ramp system for the lift and a "weigh-bridge" for the scales, drive-on and drive-off. The center pieces fold in half with hinges, and are very light. 3 longitudinal "beams" and 1/2" ply is pretty light.
Carlos, 2 little cars fit no problem, but I mostly park the Spyder in the enclosed trailer. But I used to fit the Spyder in there with the Allroad in the winter, along with the requisite snowblower......
Gordon/Stan: I have an 8000 btu A/C permanently mounted where there used to be a window. I have two 5000 watt electric heaters diagonally opposite. The meter REALLY spins but I use heat sparingly in the winter.
Gordon:
I put a couple conduits from my house to the garage about ten years ago. I had ONE 15amp circuit out there. I ran 4 conductor wire and now have 100 amp service in the garage with a sub-panel(200 amp at the main).
One conduit is for power, and the other has coax and cat5 in it, multiple runs of both. Conduit is cheap, it's the trench that costs money. 18" minimum depth for plastic, I made mine 24" to make sure. Put some gas pipe in there too and you'll be all set.
Danny wrote: The meter REALLY spins . The all electric home and speedster shop I previously had in PA would spin up $700 electric bills in the winter. Our retirement townhome here in WV and the attached 26 x 28 garage cost is a meager $85 - $90 tops a month heating with natural gas.
Alan, it might cost me an extra $100 to $150 a season with the the use I give it.
@DannyP posted:Gordon/Stan: I have an 8000 btu A/C permanently mounted where there used to be a window. I have two 5000 watt electric heaters diagonally opposite. The meter REALLY spins but I use heat sparingly in the winter.
We're the Saudi Arabia of NG, which has been dirt-cheap for 20 years (the cost is all in maintaining the infrastructure, the gas itself is practically free). If you have gas available, it's ALWAYS the way to go.
However, when you do your shop in the Smokies (when you move) talk to me about mini-splits. They're the hot setup for a climate like that, efficient heat down to 0*, no need for gas (assuming it isn't available where you'd build) or resistance heat.
We need more here (and where you are now), but for anything south of the Mason Dixon line, they're a very decent alternative, and probably better than LP.
I will certainly be consulting with you, Stan. The A/C unit I had already, and the hanging heaters were free, so it was just labor to install them. They came with wire and conduit and thermostats, I only had to purchase a few breakers.
Is there ever a project that we do where we stop saying I should of could of etc. etc.
I made the mistake of not running the gaz line when I was doing a complete ground reno and building the garage which would now be a lot more cash to do so I could probably go ten years and still not recoup the cost so I decided to do a 5000W overhead heater on a thermostat with the insulated garage.
On the other hand a heat PUMP exchanger/AC,UNIT might do for a 24x24 garage.
We had central air in the house in South Carolina - a big honkin' heat pump with an air handler in the attic. It did a great job of heating/cooling the house but really made the meter spin in the winter when the Aux heat strips came on (think giant kitchen toaster, here). It also made a whole lot of whoooshing noise when the fan came on.
Here in Mass., we have 4 Mitsubishi Mini-Splits for the entire house and we love them. Very efficient (like under $50/month to cool the place) absolutely silent and they heat the place, as Stan says, down to zero, although our Viesman hot-water furnace usually takes over under 40* out. The Viesman heats with natural gas and is equally cheap to run and while it was a tad more expensive than, say, a Bosch or other unit, it is tiny and the overall cost of ownership is equal to or less than competing units over their lives. Thankfully, both the Mini-splits and Viesman survived the spike (some Good News there).
That is good news, Gordon. If you fry a board in those, it generally means starting over.
More good news! The guys who installed our heat and A/C came by for their twice-annual service call and checked out the Veissman boiler as part of that and........
IT STILL WORKS!!! 
We were actually afraid to turn it on, but I had killed the emergency switch back at the middle of June (didn't need heat, here, for sure) and we didn't want any more bad news right now, but the B-E Energy guys checked everything out and it came right up with zero error codes.
WHEW!!!!! Dodged a big bullet there, but since it wasn't connected to power ( the emergency switch was "off" ) we saved it. Thank GOD!
Plus, we've got another bottle of Mapreco Portuguese wine to go with our Portuguese Cod recipe for dinner. Life is getting back to normal, and I even built a rack to store our "Flotilla" of kayaks and canoe. I needed something different for a change and managed to find some very scarce (right now) PT lumber.
Like for "Admiral Boom and Mr. Binnicle" (look them up) - 'The wind has changed - Time to move ahead........'
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@IndianBob My late brother once had a 1937 Indian "upside down four" bike for a while. Never actually got it running (it was one of those "dream things") but it looked really cool sitting in the shop for a year or so - Kind of "Art Deco" in appearance. There is a woman here in Mass., Jody Perewitz, who still rides old Indians and Harleys and has done several cross-country rallys on them including the Cannonball. She's a VERY cool lady:
Nice rack @Gordon Nichols. You don't hear that very often from one guy to another.
I need to build one for my flotilla, two kayaks and a canoe. Though our canoe is hanging on the living room wall. It's a Mad River Explorer with ash gunnels and cane seats. It's too nice to keep outside.
In the Spring, I cover the cockpits of the kayaks with plastic bags to keep the birds from nesting in them.
There’s some guy out near Cape Cod who builds wooden canoes that look like pieces of wood art. I once bought a large pocket full of raffle tickets at a Ducks Unlimited banquet in hopes of winning one but, had I won, I would have had to build a classy Log Home with vaulted ceilings around it just for a place to display it!
It was nice to build something new instead of fixing broken stuff after last week.
@Gordon Nichols posted:There’s some guy out near Cape Cod who builds wooden canoes that look like pieces of wood art. I once bought a large pocket full of raffle tickets at a Ducks Unlimited banquet in hopes of winning one but, had I won, I would have had to build a classy Log Home with vaulted ceilings around it just for a place to display it!
It was nice to build something new instead of fixing broken stuff after last week.
Gordon, if you ever get excited about custom, hand built row boats, contact John Spadaro in Barrington (just off the bike path!). He's a hobbyist of the finest kind.
Wooden boat builders are definitely NOT a dying breed in New England, thanks to the International Yacht and Restoration School in Newport, RI. An old childhood friend from Vermont went there to learn decades ago and returned later on to teach there. There are several other wooden boat schools scattered around NE and all are thriving. The only wood in my canoe is the central support for carrying it to the water!
So who has more photos of their "Garage-Mahal"?
I have a beautiful custom built double ended row boat at the cottage and it's one of my favourite modes of transport for any of wife, dogs, kids etc. It's great exercise, stable and perfect to tow the odd fishing lure. Summer multi-tasking.
Doesn't compare to my 1940 Peterborough cedar strip canoe that passed through to me from my Dad. Deep V so you really have to know what you're doing to pilot that one. Weighs a ton too compared to the wider/newer ones. That sees the water just once a year though and stays on the rack in the boathouse. I love old boats.
@Gordon Nichols posted:@IndianBob My late brother once had a 1937 Indian "upside down four" bike for a while.
I have a 1908 Indian Board Track Racer ‘Tribute Bike’ that won 1st place for Best Display at the Easy Riders Motorcycle Show in Sacramento a couple of years ago and also has been in a show in Carmel. It’s parked in the very back left hand side of my garage. However, it doesn’t show in the photo well so I’ll just post some pictures of it.
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