There are certain automotive beds we make in which we must lie. My big one is owning a dozen vehicles and not moving out of my house in Newton to a car-centric property with a big metal outbuilding. Instead, I continue to rent space for five cars in a warehouse in Monson, an hour and a half away, squeeze three cars into the home garage, and leaving yet more cars in the driveway. This has only worked because the overflow driveway cars have historically been the daily drivers—my 2003 E39 530i, my wife’s 2013 Honda Fit, and the Nissan Armada—and sitting outside is simply their lot in life. Less desirable is the fact that the 1999 Z3 also sits outside, but that’s part of the realpolitik of the deal I have with it and myself regarding continued ownership. Since the cars in the Monson warehouse get blocked in by RVs, trailers, and boats, I need to plan my winter work and make any garage-for-Monson swaps by Thanksgiving. The three cars that are protected in the garage over the winter are the ’73 E9 3.0CSi and whatever I think I will be working on during the cold dark months. For a few years, that’s meant that the two other over-winter garage spots have been occupied by Hampton, the 52,000-mile survivor 2002, and the ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special.
This has been the winter interior landscape of the garage for the past few years.
This fall, I upended the apple cart (or, to continue the “made my own bed” analogy, shorted my own bedsheets) by adding two more cars to the roster. The first was the FrankenThirty—the ratty but essentially rust-free ’88 E30 325is that turned out to be the back 2/3 of one car and the front clip of another, including its ETA engine. Its purchase pushed the car count to 13, a de facto ceiling against which I’ve bumped several times but had never exceeded. While I could’ve rented another space for it in the Monson warehouse, I knew that the car’s highly imperfect nature meant it would sit outside in the driveway. Like the Z3, that’s part of the deal with the car and myself. Plus, if it’s here over the winter, I can continue to work on it.
The FrankenThirty occupying prime garage space during its sort-out this past fall. You can see how the theoretical 4th garage space becomes project workspace.
But then I bought the 1969 Lotus Elan +2. Its acquisition ticked the counter up to 14, which was unprecedented. Something had to give.
I smile whenever I walk into the garage and see these jewels, but it’s a problem over the winter.
Fortunately, there was a safety valve. My 98-year-old neighbor Jeanette, whose husband made my life a living hell for decades, has the same leaning corrugated metal one-car garage that I tore down when I built mine in 2006. Jeanette still drives on short errands, but for convenience, she leaves her Honda Accord at the top of the driveway, so her garage is empty. So when I asked if I could over-winter a car (Hampton) in her garage, she was glad to oblige.
Pretty little Hampton is tucked away inside.
On paper, I have exactly the right number of protected indoor spaces. And I do… until I need to work on something not already in the garage. The recently purchased Elan +2 sits in the place of honor over the mid-rise lift, as I still have a lengthy punch list of sort-out issues to deal with before spring. The E9 is in the back left corner, jammed in next to the shelving and the parts washer. The Europa is in the easily accessible spot behind the roll-up door. None of this makes it easy if I want to work on the E30, which I am increasingly thinking about, as I’m thinking of driving it to The Vintage in the spring. The car is entirely road-worthy and fairly well sorted. Still, I’d like to resurrect its air conditioning before heading into the maw of southern heat, and that requires pulling and flushing the compressor, something I’d rather not do on jack stands. And the muffler is so rusty that it’s astonishing that the car isn’t deafeningly loud. I found a very good used exhaust section for $50 last month, but my days of doing exhausts in the driveway in the winter are decades behind me. It makes sense to get the car into the garage, put it on the mid-rise lift, and leave it there for the duration of the work. Or at least be able to pull it on or off the lift easily.
Yup.
And therein lies the problem. To do so requires kicking a car out into the elements. I don’t want the E9 or either of the Lotuses to sit outside for anything but a short stint in clear weather, and even with that, I wince when I need to start them. The E9 with its retrofitted L-Jetronic injection fires up immediately but the Lotuses with their Stromberg carbs require a lot of choke and throttle, and when they do finally catch, the idle is horrible until they warm up. Imagining the cold 20W50 oil moving like honey through the passages gives me the heebie-jeebies. Old cars are best started, warmed up, and then given a drive, but with the chalk-like consistency of the salted roads, I don’t want to do that either. And I’m leery about putting the Europa in the driveway under a cover, as I had an episode a few years ago where doing so damaged the car’s fragile, dried-out paint.
In years past, I’ve fit a fourth car in the garage by putting one on wheel dollies and sliding it sideways. That’s still possible, but it’s a fair amount of work rearranging things that are taking up floor space, and it makes it so that I have very little room for projects to spread out (see the above pic of the FrankenThirty). Another issue is that, obviously, the cars have to fit lengthwise. The garage is 31 feet long, which easily accommodates small cars like two 2002s, but when one of the cars is the E9, and it needs to be on the side where the tools and shelving are, it’s challenging.
Packing in four. I’ve done it multiple times, but there are issues.
So the E30 continues to sit outside, which means it’s not getting tinkered with. At some point, I may see if I can rent another space in Monson for the Europa for the winter, and either drive it or trailer it out there. An overlapping option is moving the mid-rise lift temporarily to the spot in the garage behind the roll-up door (it’s pretty easy to move) and landlocking the Elan +2 in front of it for a few months. This would make it so I only need to start and move the Europa, not the Elan.
Yeah, I know. First-world problems. But they’re crimping my ability to do winter wrenching. And if I can’t lay hands on metal in a heated garage where I don’t need to shimmy on the asphalt like a worm, it’s just not going to happen.
—Rob Siegel
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