|
When I bought the
Challenger, we were living in our first house in Wheaton, Illinois. We had a one car
garage that was so small, if I pulled the Challenger in, you could only open one door at a
time. I always wanted a decent place to work on cars, so a big garage was a
prerequisite for our next house. We had the place
we're living in now built and we poured the most excess money into the garage. It's
not huge - standard three car garage - but I did have them extend it back about three
feet. It's insulated and has insulated garage doors - Midwest winters
can be brutal. I installed
a 50,000 BTU Reznor furnace with a programmable thermostat so I can be
comfortable all year around. As designed, the garage had a supporting member in
between the second and third car stalls. I had them remove the pole so I could pull
the car in sideways to work on it. I also had the builder pour an extra six inches
of asphalt on each side of the driveway so the sides won't crumble when you're pulling out
or parking near the edges of the garage. I was so damn happy with the garage that I wanted to make it someplace I would enjoy spending a lot of time. I decided to semi-finish it. I had no idea what I had bitten off when I decided to re-mud it, paint it, and then -- hand paint all of the Mopar logos throughout the company's history on the walls. The final job took me about 4 months to complete, but it was worth the effort.
|
Work in progress Click on any of the above pictures to see a larger view. The second picture shows how it's done. I downloaded some really small gifs (about 320x200) of all of the Mopar logos. I then blew them up to fit on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper and printed them out on transparencies. I borrowed an overhead and projected them on the wall. Unfortunately, that's only half the story. Because of the oddities of an overhead projector, flex in the transparancies, complete lack of clarity in the digitally enhanced logo - about 75% of each logo I had to do freehand, basically using the overhead projection as nothing more than a guide. They turned out a lot better than I had originally expected, considering a) I've never done anything like this before, and b) the professionals wanted $1500 to do it themselves... |
