TOWNER, N.D. - "Four-car garage and we're still adding on," is the line Waylon Jennings used in his song, Luchenbach Texas, as he lamented the rat race of acquisition and the yearn for simpler times.
There's no one in our neighborhood with a four-car garage, but there're a few two-car models and some steel pole barns that neighbors park their cars in.
So, to keep up appearances with our neighbors, and because we really thought it'd be nice to have, we began pondering some car storage.
I suggested an 80-by-160 pole barn structure with a small patch of concrete and an overhead door in one corner for parking the car. As long as we were building, we could just as well overbuild a little and have an indoor roping arena or a place to work cattle or store some equipment away from the elements.
My wife suggested a two-car garage attached to the house. I told her we could attach the roping arena, I mean big garage, to the house, too, but she wasn't buying what I was selling. I put away my bar napkin blueprint for the arena and we settled on a two-car garage.
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Extended completion
Like most projects, the jobs we hired professionals to do, like pour concrete and frame up the structure, didn't take too long. The jobs we left for ourselves to do, insulating, drywalling and finishing, are yet to be done.
In an effort to stimulate my winter ambition and finish the garage, we hooked up the heat for it. Actually, I was going to do that myself, too, but after looking at the box full of copper fittings, pumps and valves I'd bought for the electric boiler, I caved in and called a plumber.
So now we have a heated, unfinished garage, a year after the carpenters left, but I've given myself a quota of hanging two pieces of drywall each week. It won't be long, and I'll actually be able to park a car where I've had that drywall stacked for the last year.
The garage has been extremely useful in helping us get the stuff out of our house that we didn't really need anymore, but we didn't want to throw away either. Most folks have a basement for that kind of stuff, but we built our house on the surface above our high water table.
I've had friends complement us on the idea of taking the money saved by not digging a basement and building a garage instead. That way, you don't have the wasted effort of climbing up and down a flight of stairs with the boxes of stuff you should've thrown away but chose to store in your basement for a couple years before finally throwing it away. Storing those same boxes in a garage keeps you on the same level without the strain of the stairs.
I can see the biggest challenge of garage ownership will be to keep the boxes to a manageable level so the cars don't get squeezed back out into the cold. We have grown fond of heated indoor parking.
No ice to scrape off the windshield, no block heater to plug in, a warm car to get into when it's 30 below outside and a warm garage to pull the sleeping baby and toddler into as we move them to their beds without waking.
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It's almost as good as an attached roping arena with a car corner.
