Kev-lar

“You’re holding up the garage with car jacks?”  Our neighbor (the female, college-teacher one, not the handyman one) laughed, hand over her mouth, as she walked up the driveway, dodging power tools, weed whackers, workbenches, bicycles, rusty paint cans and other soiled and seldom-seen or used accoutrement or modern homeownership, like a tailback weaving untouched through gaping holes in the Ohio State defense.  I had pulled everything out of the garage three days earlier, praying for clear skies.

I took Peggy’s question as a rhetorical one and didn’t answer.  The truth was, though I pictured myself in Peggy’s eyes as a man’s man - the kind of guy who knew, instinctively, how to build and repair shit with a crowbar in one hand, a Coors in the other, and ready to carry on a casual conversation all the while - she had nearly startled the poop out of me.  I had been concentrating so hard on the creaks.

You see, I had discovered that I couldn’t pull the walls together with my bare hands after all.  After the eye-bolt scare (see Garage Fun, Part One), I went though a chain phase.  I decided that it was too risky to attach a cable ratchet to the walls, so I bought massive chains to wrap around the garage’s most warped wall beams.  That way, nothing would tear loose and ricochet around the garage like a stray bullet.  Using the chains, the walls would either pull together, the ratchet itself would break under the strain, or the individual wood beams would be wrenched in half.  It’s this third option that I saw happening when I decided to abandon the wall-pulling idea altogether.

On to the next option - raising the sunken roof to bring the walls back in.  Though I had never bothered to look before, I figured that there were spare tires and jacks in both of our cars, and those careful American carmakers didn’t disappoint.  I set these tricky little contraptions up in the middle of the garage, found 2 x 4s that reached to a few inches below the peak of the roof, and started jacking with my hands.  Hard.  Up and down it went, repeatedly, as I tried to figure out which way was up.  Longer and longer the jacking lasted.  Ohhhh, it was so good.

The whole process made me jumpy.  The 2 x 4s could jack right through the roof.  They could slip from the jack at a crucial moment, bringing beams and shingles crashing down to the spot where I squatted.  At every creak, my heart skipped a beat, I held my breath, and my eyes darted around the rafters above me, looking for the precise source of the noise.

The 4 x 4 that had been supporting one of the crossbeams, and thus holding up the entire structure, came unlodged and started to fall incredibly slowly, like it couldn’t fathom its new, purposeless existence.  When it reluctantly admitted that it could no longer stand on end on the sloping concrete, the 4 x 4 hit the ground with a hollow explosion, and I fell to the ground, covering my head with my arms like those oh-so-effective, cold-war-style, nuclear attack drills.  At least my head would be protected in the instant of vaporization.  At the next half-turn of the jack, there was a splitting sound like a gunshot, and I bolted to the open garage door.  It took all my courage to go back inside, so it’s understandable that I was at wits end when Peggy’s voice turned my bowels to jelly.

Eventually, the car jack method worked, though I didn’t have the cajones to continue raising the roof to the point of perfect alignment.  I reinforced the old crossbeams as soon as I could, slapped up some new ones, and removed - permentantly, I hope - the 4 x 4 and tabletop structural supports.  The walls are still bowed.   The floor is still humped.  The roof still leaks.  I need to continue the project.  But the garage now stands on its own, and I have to admit that jacking the erection beside the house satiated that desire for a little while.