Fitting Everything in the Garage

Cramped garage before the grand reorganization.

One of the major stipulations from my wife Heidi was that the trailer AND both of our cars would fit in the garage...this was an imperative of the project...not negotiable. The trailer itself fit just fine in the garage, but with a 7' 2" wide platform on top, the garage became a bit more cramped and would only become more so as the walls went up. We are fortunate to have a unique garage with adjoining basement underneath our house. It is a three car garage in essence, although we have never owned three cars, and one side is a "tandem" space. It was one of the reasons I bought the house initially as I wanted a dedicated indoor workshop space and exercise area. With this garage I was able to have it all including a climbing wall in the corner used for working out. Since I needed more space to work on the trailer, I made an executive decision one morning to completely reorganize the garage after realizing that the current configuration was NOT going to work for this project. Especially since I would likely work on the trailer project only between 4 & 8 hours per week depending on what my schedule allowed.

The new configuration moved the climbing wall and workout area to the single bay side of the garage and required that the car be moved out for a full workout or climb, not really that big of a deal. I left a small corner on the two-bay side of the garage for riding my road bike on rollers and accessing weights and medicine balls, the elliptical trainer in the picture above came inside. This allowed me to have easy access to everything accept the garage wall side of the trailer, which once framed would not be an issue as the door faced the opposite direction. If more space was needed, the care on the two-bay side could be backed out, the trailer rolled back about 10 - 12 feet and I would have about 150 square feet of workshop space with the trailer still inside. Quite the luxury for a project that started in October and would take most of the winter to frame before it could be outside in the elements.