Ar ticle: Garage Restoration (cont’d)

from PCA Chesapeake Region Patter - May/June 2021 Vol 62, Issue 05/06

Colonial Challenge Cup DE/Track Day

Steve & Joan Wood

The desire to renovate our 1928 garage had been in the back of our minds for close to the entire 24 years of our ownership! But alas the house & property came first, not to mention raising the kids, coaching sports, participating in community events, etc. Plus, the daunting task of solving logistics were the most difficult. I stressed over trying to figure out what to do with the cars for the 4-5 months, where to store the tool chests, and what to do with heavy stuff like the 400lb upright air compressor! Lol, all of those things held me back for a long time. It wasn’t until the pandemic hit that our son was able to come back from Long Island NY and help me with the hard stuff. He still had his apartment, his job, his life, but furlough allowed him to come back for 2.5 months, and THAT was the muscle I was going to need to rebuild the entire front wall. The werks included lally column support, squaring up new 2x6 stud framing (which, for 93 yr old horse barn style openings, getting things square, plum and level was a treat!), electrical wiring, insulation, Azek trim and eventually new garage doors were all on the docket for the rebuild. Then some nice new enhancements were also part of the plan, such as a new concrete floor coating, car lift, wall cabinets, and more.

We stored the cars at a local storage facility (stressful in & of itself), moved stuff into sheds, and had bins & boxes of tools & supplies moved into our attic. For the garage doors, given lead times for product & labor, we picked out and ordered new garage doors & openers (qty 3), so that we would not be left with a wide open building for more than a day. We narrowed our search for the doors down to Garaga & Clopay, and finally chose the 2” thick, 3-layer Gallery, R18 Clopay doors in a raised panel coachman style. It seemed a perfect style and match for our colonial style home. Plus I was also able to switch from the overhead bar-&-chain style opener, to a header torsion & vertical cable style. This would give me much more ceiling headroom above the bays, and allow greater height for a car lift. Being a 90+ year old building, the ceiling height is only 9 feet, so giving ourselves the most headroom was very important.

For the floor coating, we decided to pay a little extra for a monolithic MMA Acrylic epoxy coating, verses just a regular epoxy, or even a polyurea. We wanted something that was quick to cure, extremely resistant to chemicals, and very durable. Regular 2-part Epoxy meets most of those demands, but the German based BASF product was the clear leader. It is the product of choice for large commercial installations, and our local company has a lot of experience mixing those chemicals. The best part of using that product is that it was literally ready for our cars that same night. It sets up so fast, and is as hard as it will ever get within 2 hours of installation. Interior: Before

Regular epoxy can take weeks to reach its full hardness. If you want to read more about this, visit https:// www.innovativefloor.com or give me a shout & I can give you my experience directly. Once we had the flooring complete, and could move all our stuff back in, we targeted the final two aspects of the renovation –the lift, and the wall cabinets. The tight space of this 3-car garage is such that any lift was going to be intrusive, and any wall cabinets that stuck too far out into the air space were going to obstruct the ability to walk around the cars. These decisions, and product research took a long time, months in fact. For the lift, we origi-

nally wanted recessed {into the floor} scissor lift. Our thinking was that it would be nice not to trip over a floor lift if there was no car in the garage. But in the end, for a “working” garage, a 2-post lift was going to give me the best unencumbered access under the cars. This would be optimal for our rear engine Porsches, as well as doing engine / tranny swaps and drive-shaft / exhaust type work on our 1st gen Chevy Camaro’s. We chose the https://www.maxjax.com. MaxJax was designed for low ceiling garages and gave me portability too. I can unbolt these posts and roll them over to the side if I choose. I also decided to run the hydraulic lines up-&-across the ceiling, and down the wall so that I would have no lines laying on the floor. I also had to customize the control panel to mount it on the wall. I am VERY happy with the result, even though I had to buy additional leak-proof hydraulic fittings and extra line length to accomplish.

The final piece of the puzzle were the wall cabinets. Would you believe that the 4 cabinets I purchased cost me MORE than the 2-post car lift!!! Yep, the Pro2 model I fell in love with are very expensive. Go figure. Lol.

Exterior: After