[69MyWay]

Continued....

Bathroom facilities are best planned during the building of a shop/garage from scratch. It is so easy and inexpensive to add the additional plumbing during the roughing out of the slab than to add it later. In either case, consideration of a way to mount a toilet in your shop area will give your wife another reason to jump for joy. No more greasy hand prints on the master toilet seat, or remnants of your buddies trips to and from your house bathroom on any given weekend while they are over helping you swap the cam in your hot rod. Depending on your shop location to your sewer/septic line you may be surprised how easy it is to bust a portion of the slab near a wall, install the drain, and have a toilet running.

You can never have enough power outlets! Depending on code laws in your area you may or may not have the flexibility to do your own wiring. Believe it or not, standard AC wiring is not that complicated. Just remember (unlike your DC wiring in the family hot rod), the black wire is the hot wire. White is common, and the copper is the ground. Power outlets have a connection on each side to run another outlet. Spending some time in the attic (on wood frame walls) you can usually fish a new wire down to the outlet, tie onto the other side, and run that back though the wall to a new location. You can also grab a junction box in the attic and pull a fresh line to a location of your choice. Spend some time doing your research here to make sure the circuit can handle the load, the proper gauge wire is used, and all safety precautions are used when routing the wire. The old guys at the home improvement warehouses are usually pretty good about making sure you have the right supplies to do the job. Those of you with masonry construction have it much easier. Your power outlets are usually mounted on the wall with the wiring in conduit. It is simple to access that box and run fresh wire and conduit on the wall to the new location for a quick new connection. There is no need to have power chords tangled all over your shop because you only have one outlet! Get creative, spend some time, and get the power where you need it!

Lighting is much the same. There is no need to deal with poor or low lighting in your shop area. Adding additional lighting follows much the same process as wiring additional power outlets. Do your research and get busy! There is no excuse for not having enough lighting where you need it.

Following the same concept, adding a phone line to your shop area is very simple. You can buy phone line in bulk quantities up to 500’ or more. In most cases a 50’ roll will get you where you need to be. You phone line carries a 30 volt charge, so be careful when splicing into your current line. You can get all the connectors you need at the local hardware store. Simply access an existing phone line in the attic, splice in, and then route the new line to an easy convenient location in the shop. If you have a detached workshop, you can usually splice into the phone line where it goes into your house box and run it in underground conduit to your detached workshop. Once you run it through your wall in a suitable location it will be connected to a wall plug and be ready for service. No more excuses for getting the house phone greasy when calling around the local auto parts stores for the best price on a set of new brake pads for the family cruiser! You can also call your local phone company and for a small amount have an additional phone line installed just about anywhere you want it. Hey…nobody likes to climb around in the attic on a summer day so a few dollars to the professional may be well worth your dime.

Here are some great ideas for the family to keep in touch with you while you are out there wrenching away. Baby monitors serve as a great inexpensive intercom system, and they are wireless so installation is as simple as plugging in the wall or adding batteries. Wireless door chimes work great as well. You and your family come up with a code. One ring means to come in the house. Two rings means pick up the phone. Three rings means…, well, you get the idea. Your wife will appreciate being able to push a button on the wall and see you come running from the shop. No more yelling out the backdoor, or having to make sure she is decent incase your buddies stopped over when she wants to come out and get you to come in the house. These can be bought for less than $20, and often baby monitors can be had for free as your buddies with children that have outgrown them are looking to give them away.

The next essential is more of a want than a need. That is the ability to access your favorite form of media from the workshop or garage. Reference the ideas above about accessing your current connection in the attic to grab a coax line from your current cable or satellite line. You can easily T off and run a fresh line out to your shop for television. Wall mounted television brackets work great to get the TV up out of the shop area, avoid taking up valuable counter space, and get the television closer to the cable connection coming out of the ceiling. A good wall mount can be purchased for less than $50, and 100’ of quality coax can be purchased for less than $30. A couple hours of your time and you can have the Speed channel piped right into your workspace. Check with your local cable company as they will run additional lines for you as well. Your family will appreciate it too as your wife can come outside and catch her favorite shows while you are wrenching away on the hot rod.

There is nothing worse than wrenching on the hot rod while pouring sweat especially when it is so easily remedied. A wall or window air conditioning unit is fairly easy to install. Most units will run off standard wall plugs. Even in poorly insulated garage areas, some ice cold air pumping into the room can drop the overall room temperature and make hot August afternoons more bearable. You may be surprised when your wife shows more interest in your project when she can come outside, have easy access to the phone, enjoy her favorite cable television, and chill out in the frosty cool breeze of the window a/c unit. When mommas happy, the hot rod budget gets bigger!

Of course, a mini-fridge is a given. They don't take up much space and don't use much electricity. Keeping some cold beverages close at hand is a great way to reward your buddies for helping out with the ride, and to cool down while you think through the next mod on your car.

Sometimes you just have to take a break. What do you do? Sit on a bucket, old tire, engine short block? No, no, no…get a real shop chair! You have a ton of options in this category ranging from store bought chairs, house discards, to cool custom made seats. Let’s focus on the cool custom made seats. Been to the auto salvage yard lately? There are hundreds of different bucket seats just waiting for a new home. With some scrap metal and a little time behind the welder you can turn a 1994 Ford Escort bucket seat into a throne fit for an automotive king! Add some wheel casters to the bottom and now you have a rolling throne capable of seating and entertaining. You might bring the wife with you to the salvage yard to pick out a couple of seats. She is more likely to hang out with you talking on the phone, watching television, chilling by the a/c when sitting in a seat of her choice from some cool donor car (and don’t forget how happy she is that the family bathroom is no longer covered in greasy hand and foot prints!). In many cases you can get free seats from body shop, repair shops, and salvage yards. What you spend on this cool garage mod is all in what kind of seat you want to wrap around your butt. Don’t forget you can yank the bench seats from vans and SUVs to make seating for three in a snap.


Now that you have clean fresh workbench space, storage, sink, toilet, phone, television, a/c, and seating…you are down to the decoration phase. While posters and calendar pin-ups are cool, don’t discount the value of your old car parts. Now is the time to go through your piles of valve covers, oil pans, timing gears, rims, emblems, door handles, and other cool parts. With a little time and consideration you can piece these parts together to create awesome garage decorations for that personal touch while at the same time cleaning out your storage shelf and saving space in the landfill. Even an old clutch disc makes a cool decoration as it can serve as a conversation piece, and a reminder of where you spent the last $800 on the hot rod.