Chrome Wheels, Woodgrain Kit and more....

AtlantaMDX: Yup, I took your advice...

It was your post that prompted me to take the pix. You should have seen the strange looks I was getting from people as they were driving past my house when I had this little mini car show going on in the street complete with photographer. Rarely do I have all of these cars out of the garage all at once, so I don't think the neighbors really know how many I have in there. And, my house sits way back up high in the forest, so you can't see the garage at all from the road. They probably think I stole all those cars.

But, doing things that keep the neighbors just a little wary and therefore keeps them from dropping in, or letting their kids play too close to my yard, or letting their dogs dump on my grass, is a good thing......

Thanks for the advice on the pix. These pix were all .jpegs. I will have to see if I can get that software to work that will allow me to carve them down a bit to a size that will post.

Thanks again.

Really off topic, but....here is garage story.

Okay, since you seem curious I will tell you the garage story, but I don't have a pix to post yet...gotta get that .jpeg resizing S/W...thanks to all who pointed me in that direction.

The garage is 1600 square feet....so yes, it is the size of a small house. It is attached to my house...actually the house kind of wraps around it. The garage is heated, has h/c running water, stereo piped in, cable TV hookups, and telephone. The garage was the whole point of building this house. The rest is just a place to sleep and poop.

You guys can tell I am a car guy. No wife, kids or pets to get in the way of my passion. (I am really misunderstood here in Utah.....I am suppose to have multiple wives, multiple kids and multiple donkeys. Multiple cars is just blasphemous!) My previous house only had a two car garage and when I started accumulating cars I didn't have room for them. I hated having them sit outside, so I bought one of those hydralic lifts....you have seen the pictures in the back of Autoweek magazine and such. I had it installed in my garage and stored my cars stacked one above the other in a two car garage.

I was the hit of the neighborhood. Kids would wait for me to leave for work in the morning so they could see inside my garage. During the school year the school bus driver actually asked me to leave for work earlier because he couldn't get his kids to get on the bus until I closed my garage door.

The garage was clearly visible from the road so people driving by would see these cars stacked when I opened my garager door. It created a lot of double takes and quite a stir in the neighborhood. I had peeping toms looking in my garage window from time to time, even though there were blinds, and sometimes they wouldn't stop at the garage window.

But, I guess those hydralic lifts are made for smaller cars, and all of my cars are full figured girls. So, after about 18 months the lift started to develop stress fractures and actually started to list to one side. I had the Riviera on top of the lift one morning when I was trying to lower it and it started to fall over...it would have dropped the Riv over onto the Syclone if it fell. Like an idiot, I ran over and tried to hold the car into the air. I can only imagine how stupid I looked in this garage with my arms over my head holding a full sized Buick in the air. (Envision music from Mighty Mouse playing in the background...."HERE HE COMES TO SAVE THE DAY!")

So, that scared me big time. I had to have two large tow trucks come in and remove the Buick from the broken lift. The 10 year warranty on this lift turned out to be worthless because it was manufactured in France and the US importer had stopped supporting them. So, I had to just yank out the lift and I was back to a two car garage....and I was out many thousands of dollars for a worthless lift that was nothing but scrap metal. I DON'T RECOMMEND THEM!

As a result, I found a secluded wooded lot and designed a house that is fairly hidden from the road. None of the houses you see in my photos are of my house. I am up behind the trees and accessible only via that steep driveway (hence the need for the MDX in the winter time). Nobody can drive by when my doors are open and see that I have a gaggle, er, flock, um, bunch of cars in there.

And, all of my cars are happily on mother earth all of the time. No more aerial stunts.

But, the point to all this is I have a 1600 square foot garage tucked neatly away, and I use all of the buttons on my MDXs Homelink Transmitter to access it....so I wish those buttons were illuminated in some way. (This is my obligatory MDX reference so this post isn't completely off topic.)

Thanks to all for your kind comments.

Ahem.....

dmyles wrote:
All I can say is "wow". That's pretty impressive! All you need now is your own gas pump!

DMOR wrote:
Otherwise the world would be full of Garages w/mini attached homes and completely UNTRAINABLE men. Where's the poker table? My husband's on his way over! I assume you're fully equipped with a garage fridge for the beer...er maybe not in Utah? I guess that's just one more reason to stock up!

Reply:
Um...I do have my own gas pump....it just isn't the kind that will fill the tank.

But it burns a flame that is a lovely shade of blue...I am thinking of having the walls of my garage painted that color...if I can find a matching fridge. Who said men can't decorate?

Oh, the home isn't particularly mini....it is 5000 square feet. The architect I worked with pointed out that I would never be able to sell a house that had storage room for many toys if it didn't have rooms for many family members. So, I have 5 unused bedrooms and as many bathrooms....but I use all those. Rather than replace the paper on the empty roll, I just move on to the next bathroom......how perfect is that?

DMor, if you don't want to hear this stuff...don't get me started!

You got it backwards.....

Ya know, men are not the untrainable ones. I swore a long time ago I wouldn't marry until I found a woman that would remember to PUT THE DAMNED SEAT BACK UP when she was done....but do they remember? Nooooooooo!

DMor, I am emailing you a picture of the house taken from the road last spring before the trees got all their leaves....during the summer the trees pretty effectively block it out entirely. I tried to post the pix here, but I am again bumping against the size restrictions to post pictures.

But, hey DMor, the inside is something you might like...since there are no kids, pets or any of those unkempt female types, the floors are all white marble or white carpet, beveled stained glass windows, five 24K chandeliers with cut crystal flutes, ball and claw jetted tubs, 2 family rooms with 2 bigscreen movie theatre systems, one with a wet bar and concession and all decorated with neon lighting......

Ya know there are a lot of benefits to not supporting a family. And yet, I am doing my patriotic duty and single handedly keeping the economy afloat.....

Boy, Deb, the things I do for you......

You can kinda see the row of doors....

Okay, ignore the car in this picture, unless you are a Mopar fan. I was trying to show Deb the row of garage doors on the right side of the house. The driveway makes a sharp left hand turn to get into the garage, so there is a large concrete pad at the top of the hill. The house goes over the garage about half way, so it is misleading how deep the garage is. You really can't tell there is a huge garage up there. And, this picture was taken in the spring before all the leaves come out on the trees. During the summer you can't really see the house at all.

I don't have any digital pictures of the inside of the garage...never found anybody really interested in them. This is a, um, "unique" audience?

Okay, I suspect this thread can die a natural death now......