Unless you’re Top Gear, it’s true that you can sleep in your car but you can’t race your house. I’ve been feeling this a bit myself lately – not because I’ve had to snuggle up with the shifter in my BRZ, but because my fiancee and I are preparing to move from our individual apartments into a house together next month. Between that, plus the end of car activities in my area for the year thanks to the approach of winter, my mind hasn’t been on cars very much lately.
But it has very much been on the possibilities. The house also happens to be attached to a large garage. No more nosy neighbors throwing a wrench into my wrenching, as they did earlier this year. No more having my tools way over here and my assigned parking space way over there. No more hassle of needing to keep an unneeded vehicle registered and insured to keep property management off our backs. No more rushing to finish a job during the precious few minutes of daylight we get during the winter. And no more having to pay a shop to change my oil when I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself. I’ll still have a pro maintain my BRZ to document its service history while it’s in warranty, but I’m all over doing the Focus myself.
I’m hoping our recent trend of relatively warm weather in New England continues through early December. I want to ride my motorcycle to its new home, with a roof over its head, if I can avoid having to trailer it. It’ll also make the moving process itself much easier. The last time I moved was during a February where it snowed every single weekend. After delaying a couple of times to avoid it, I ended up moving in a snowstorm anyway, as seen here. As a great philosopher once said, ain’t nobody got time for that.
I’m looking forward to getting all my tools back to one place where they belong. Though I have a tool chest, it’s somewhat inaccessible in my small storage area where I live now. I end up taking what I need, using it, and never putting them back because I live on the top floor and the chest is in the basement. As a result I don’t even know where my basic screwdrivers are right now. I’m sure it’ll all turn up while I’m packing. It’ll feel like Christmas morning, getting my soldering iron and cordless impact wrench that I already own. The new garage has not one but two workbenches, plus a set of old cabinets on the wall, so I’ll have plenty of room to store and organize everything there.
I’ll enjoy spending some quality time in the garage, both getting it set up the way I want it and actually doing some work in there. I’ll be able to swap brake pads the days before and after I go to the track, rather than putting up with the squeal of race pads for a week or two surrounding the event. I’ll be able to repair or replace my BRZ’s cracked bumper cover, still taped together after last winter’s unfortunate meeting with a frozen bank at an IceCross. It’s the sort of thing that I haven’t done in so long that I forgot how much I miss tinkering in the garage until it was about to become possible again.
I’ll bring you along for the ride, too – through the setup process, how I decide to organize things, and of course with the various projects I’ll be able to take on in my fully operational battle station garage. There may even be some vehicle changes on the horizon. Stay tuned…
(Top photo credit: Top Gear)
