When we purchased our house it was just dumb luck that the garage had a 12' ceiling. Shortly after moving in, I purchased a 4 post lift and simply stored the Camaro on it for many years before starting my PT build. My lift is not anchored and in fact Stinger sells a wheel kit that will actually allow you to move the lift around. I can tell you that there is no way I could have built Dust Off alone without this lift! It was the best investment I have ever made in shop tools. A lift with a 9' ceiling will not be suitable for working under the car unless you can come up will some method of working in a 4' or 5' overhead. My neighbor liked my lift and decided he wanted one in his garage but he only had 9' clearance. He went in and modifed his roof trusses to allow him to raise the car up into the attic space of his garage. As for earthquakes, we had a 7 magnitude quake here is VA a couple of years ago and the car and lift moved about an inch but suffered no damage of any kind. That same quake did crack my basement walls however. For the garage door, I modified the track to raise the door up close to the ceiling and changed the spring and cable system to a torsion spring opener.
