Garage
Unless I’m in the hospital or on a trip, I see the floor of our garage every day.
It never makes me happy.
Never.
It was my first building project. When we moved onto the farm, there was a garage about fifty yards from the house. Great-Grandpa kept his carriage in it, and then I imagine his Model T. He evidently didn’t mind shoveling a path through fifty yards of snowbanks, but I’m clearly made of lesser stuff.
Great-Uncle Carl and my father grafted an extension on the back side so Carl’s mammoth Buick would fit. An aside - that led to my dad getting the compliment he cherished above all others – when they finished the project Carl turned to him and said, “You’re a pretty good scrub carpenter.”
The garage had sliding doors, but by this time they were below ground level, which made them all but unusable in the winter.
My plan was to jack it up, put some old telephone poles under it to roll it closer to the house and put it on a shiny new concrete foundation.
I made some mistakes. A few…many …mistakes. This was about 45 years ago, but I’ve always had an unreasonable amount of confidence in my ability to do things I don’t know how to do. Combine that with a lack of enough funding to hire the project done competently and any rational person would see some clouds on the horizon.
The first thing I did wrong was not compact the new gravel base. I just thought that if I plunked down a pile of gravel a couple of feet high it would stay that high. As it turned out, that was incorrect, and also, concrete does not like to just hang suspended in midair.
My next goof up was that I used wire mesh to strengthen the concrete. Here’s the thing. Concrete is strong in compression, which means you can pile stuff on it and it won’t break. It is weak in tension, which means it’s not very bendy. So, you have to add some kind of skeleton to give it needed reinforcement. Usually that’s in the form of metal rods called rebar, although many contractors have switched to fiberglass rods. For a while, metal mesh was used. A problem with mesh is that all was well if it was in the middle of the concrete, but more often than not it would get stepped on and end up at the bottom, which made it...what’s the word…useless.
I did other things wrong, but I'm only allowed six hundred words, so I'll wrap up. The end result is that the new concrete started to crack almost as soon as it cured, and over the last four decades it just kept getting worse.
Honestly, I tell myself it doesn't matter all that much. The garage isn't attached to the house, so rodents and reptiles aren't really an issue. We rarely shut the garage doors because the dog has chewed off the garage door opener wires (three times), so all in all, it functions in its role of keeping the car and pickup out of the weather.
It performs another role as well, as a continual reminder that sometimes you need to have the work done by someone who knows what they're doing.
It's an example I think about during election season. There's always the temptation to go in the voter's booth and throw the bums out. And I won't discourage anyone from doing that. But running big government is complicated – at least as complicated as pouring concrete or doing an appendectomy. We shouldn't scorn people who've spent years or decades learning how to do it and we should be careful about throwing support behind people who appear to have nothing but contempt for the actual work of governing.
Just a thought I had as I stared at my garage floor.
Copyright 2024 Brent Olson