I am now more envious of the build threads of you guys with immaculate three car garages with epoxy floors. I wonder how many of the rest of you fell into the same trap I have, requiring some nest building before really getting any airplane parts cut. It's a rabbit trail that goes deep into the earth.

We moved in March to a house we bought over a year ago. The 'new' house is a Victorian built in 1905. The house was a dump but it had good bones and once my favorite woman is done with it, it will be quite an upgrade (it's actually shocking how much we've done so far). The garage though, not so much. Before the move I had an approximately two car garage before with a pretty good loft, and now I have a long single car garage. I won't win any contests for building in the smallest space, especially because I already have a hangar, but it's not ideal.

115 years old and no one ever poured a slab in the garage. Where the house has good bones the garage does not. At some point in the last century someone extended the garage from roughly 11.5 x 21' to about 11.5 x 30'. I'm happy for the extra 9' but it's obvious that whoever did the extension had no structural background of any kind. Where the studs used to go up to the rafters, they cut them off. At first glance it appeared like they installed a header. In reality they nailed a 2x6 to the side of the cut off studs and provided no support at the ends. It was literally hanging from the studs instead of holding them up.

The stud spacing for the entire structure ranges from 24-29". Several of the ceiling joists (the horizontal piece) was sagging from people using them as loft storage. Upon exposing the studs on the long back wall I found many that were a Rube Goldberg variation of scabbed together 2x4s at random angles.

We had a slab poured about twenty days before we moved in. With the house being a priority I have been tripping on everything I own just getting various projects done. This past weekend it was time to make space to bring the fuselage home or build wings. I started by staring at those messy studs and then came to the conclusion that I would need to shore up the structure before I put in any work benches, extra outlets, or hang anything on the walls.

At the end of one long sweaty day I had removed the imposter "header", trimmed the hanging studs a bit higher, installed a plate a cross the bottom of the them, created a more substantial header from two 2x6s and made two stub walls to support it. I doubled up the ceiling joists with full length "sisters", jacking up the old sagging pieces before joining them together. I'm a big fan of screws and haven't spent much time swinging a hammer in the past few decades, and certainly not since getting bifocals.

I have replaced the dreary incandescent bulbs with some of those LED lights with "wings". Holy smokes I could probably offer the place up for surgical procedures if they didn't mind some dirt. I've got several pieces of peg board to put up and some budget for benches, cabinets and storage solutions.

My saw horses for wing construction are done. One of them came out pin straight, sits rock solid on the garage floor and shows perfectly level. The other is also pin straight but wobbled a little bit. At one end it measures exactly the same height (32-3/16")and the other is a tiny bit low. That will actually work out well for purposes of leveling them and making them "fast" to the floor with bondo.