The Center of Things
My favorite place: there is a stereo, a beer fridge, and a bunch of dangerous tools to mess with. Heaven.
Back in the late 80's, early 90's, I used to live in East Palo Alto. It was not a great time to live there. There was a lot of drugs in the area, and all the stuff that went with it, like gunfire every night. My house was all of 600 square feet. You could sit on the couch and see all four corners of the house. The only door inside the house was on the bathroom, and I slept on the floor. So why live there? Easy: it was cheap and had a 700 sq foot garage. Yep, the garage was bigger than the house.
It's all about priorities.
So I finally bought a house in Redwood City. It had a 750 sq foot garage. The house was pretty much a freshly-painted turd when I bought it, but it sat on a really big lot by Silicon Valley standards and had a nice big garage.
After eight years or so, we ended up moving to the Santa Cruz mountains. The location was amazing and the house was fantastic. The only problem was that the garage was 400 sq ft. It was 20 ft by 20 ft, and to add insult to injury, there was a post in the middle of the garage. Even if you tried to park a car in there, the post would make sure that you wouldn't be able to open the door. Not that I would have to worry about putting a car in there: my crap would fill all available space anyway.
Mary told me that we could build a bigger garage (except we spent all the money on the house), so we bought the place, and I crammed all my crap into 400 sq ft.
Well, most of my crap. Some of the other crap got stored under the house, or in the two lofts built into the garage. The only good thing about the garage was that it had a 10 foot ceiling.
The first 8 years or was the motorbike era. The garage was filled with bikes. There was never enough room, and whenever I wanted to use a tool, I had to move everything around for an hour before I could free enough space to work. Using the tubing bender practically meant moving 1/4 of the garage contents onto the driveway.
It was not ideal.
Then, my mom moved out of her house, and I had to bring down the Model-T from Alberta. That caused a major floor-space upheaval. I had to move my bikes over to my buddy Bill's house to make room for the car.
That may have ended up being a 'good thing', since we finally got it together to hire someone to build us a new garage.
The new garage will end up just over 900 sq feet. I think I heard something from Mary about "new bath, new living room, new floors, ..." but I was concentrating on those 500 extra sq feet of concrete slab. Mary spends her days picking out tile. I spend mine picking out the automatic transfer switch, deciding where the 220V outlets will go, where the Ethernet ports will be, and where the compressed air drops should go. I admit, it is hard to call this a 'project' when the toughest thing I do is write cheques, but I'm going to let that slide since when everything is done, the new garage should enable lots of future projects.
I can't wait.
Unfortunately, I have to. It's the nature of construction projects.
Next: One last look before it all begins.
It will be worth it in the end.
Wright Cyclones in full song.