Making Room

Since moving into my circa-1922 house with detached garage, my main focus of car roadification has been Corvairs. I’ve been able to relatively comfortably fit project, tools, and parts simultaneously into my two-car garage. At seventeen and a half feet wide by nineteen feet deep, it’s not spacious, but I’ve read about folks that have done far more with far less square footage. The footprint of my ’65 LeMans is roughly twenty-five percent greater than a Corvair, so there’s no way I could continue hoarding Corvair parts on the shelves taking up a good chunk of precious floor space. For the last couple months I’ve made a huge dent in the size of my stash – a complete Corvair engine plus spare block, gone via Craigslist; two pickup truck loads of parts, gone to the Corvair Ranch; a big bolt bin full of bits; emptied into small tubs now sitting on a small shelf high on the side wall. Even with this cleansing, I still feel, as you can see from the drawing below, that I’m gonna’ be cramped.

The stall behind the garage will be available once I pull the LeMans out, but my first thought (and the easiest plan to implement) is to put the Corvair that I’m keeping back there, out of the way. That would free up the portable tent garage that sits in my driveway for holding parts and body pieces as they’re pulled off the car. The portable garage is not secure nor weathertight, so I wouldn’t be comfortable moving any of my tools out there, thus they’d still be taking up precious space in the garage.



Another plan I’ve cooked up is to put the Corvair in the portable tent garage and properly enclose the stall behind the garage with T-111 screwed to the six-by-sixes posts to form the walls. Initially, gravel and plywood would constitute a floor with concrete being poured at a later (much later) date. I’d cut a doorway in the garage’s rear wall and hang a 36” door. I’ll put up the heavy-duty shelves for staging LeMans parts and empty the garage of everything except my rolling tool chest and a work bench. I like the looks of the following.