Assembling a WWII Jeep from scratch took a toll on my body, my marriage, and my house, and I’m working to improve all three. Since I don’t want to show you photos of me working out or going on dates with my hot wife, I’ll focus this article instead on my house, which has been a dumpster fire for over a year thanks to my ambitiously awesome Jeep project.
I’d never categorize my wrenching style as particularly … neat. I’m meticulous and organized in the ways that matter (you can’t complete challenging projects on a tight deadline like I have unless you’re organized), but my workplace often looks like a disaster zone.
Here’s what I mean; this is the worst my suburban LA home got during my brand new-WWII Jeep project:
The thing you see a lot of is blue shop towels. That’s because I was dealing with lots of components that had to be very clean — primarily bearings and brake parts. Grease on brakes or contaminants in bearings can lead to performance/longevity issues, so I was wielding blue towels a lot. Should I have trashed them as soon as I was done using them? Yes. As they say in the popular Hulu Series The Bear, “clean as you go.” I did not.
But I did get the job done while maintaining high standards for quality, so I guess it is what it is.
Laurence and I had to erect a tent at one point when it started raining:
This was the view from our bedroom:
My wife, Elise, loved that.
Eventually, that tent did come down after things became way too hot in there:
And eventually, I completed the Jeep and slowly started cleaning up, revealing the oil stains on what was a brand new concrete deck pad/driveway:
Will those stains ever come out? Probably not. I’ll pressure wash the driveway, but the concrete deck pad (the left side of the photo above) I’ll have to cover with a shiny new wood deck. Elise is excited for that.
I recently gathered a bunch of metal scrap from the build and threw it out. “We’re rich!” I told Elise. “I made $15 on scrap!”
“How much did the gas cost you to get there?” she replied.
She had a fair point.
Still, things are looking better these days. The insane number of boxes from all the parts I ordered off eBay are gone, as is the big pallet on which the Jeep body tub arrived, as are all the wood planks that were shrink-wrapped to the frame to protect it during shipping:
I also managed to sell off a bunch of stuff locally. This big shed that stored my motors and other parts?
It’s gone:
My spare WWII Jeep axles? They’re out of the driveway and went to a local Jeep nut, for free:
The Red Cross Camp that was on our back patio has been dismantled, and I sold it for $40:
In addition, I managed to sell my reference Jeep and my spare engine. After buying them all for a total of around $4000, I sold them as a package for $6000. Not bad; I made The Autopian a couple stacks:
So what does the driveway look like today, with the shed gone, the tent gone, the axles gone, the metal scrap gone, and the reference Jeep gone? Lemme ask Elise to snap me a picture:
So much for that.
The lawn is still toast from all the degreasing Laurence and I did there.
And many of my clothes are ruined forever.
So there’s still work to do. Elise bought me a bunch of clothing for a white hot deal at Costco (Costco’s clothes are somehow … not bad?), and the driveway is clearer than it has been in months. But there’s still a ton of junk on it. I need to clean it all up, because my son is now not only walking, he is running, and he has never once gotten to play in our backyard.
So folks, I’m in the doghouse, but — with the help of my power washer and a bunch of deckboards — I plan to soon make the back area look better than ever. I just need to find time between running a media company and running after a toddler. Hmm …
All photos: David Tracy/The Autopian
Gee, I think you deserve to be in the doghouse. Anyway, consider an epoxy flake floor coating. Not cheap, but looks great! We had our garage/shop finished with a company named Deluxe Garage. Probably a franchise…
IVE HEARD if you spread that oil dry powder you can get in big bags at the parts store on the stain and leave it for a few days, it will pull the oil from the concrete.
If one is in a hurry to get the oil soaked up and the concrete de-greased a bit faster, grind in oil-dri with your feet (in shoes, of course). Then follow up with the power washer.
Now, those oil-soaked Autopian shirts… you should sign them and have them as giveaway items!
Is it legal to ship hazmat? They may need to be given away at IRL meets.
Also there’s probably solvents in some of them, and they can spontaneously combust.
Do it barefoot and get some exfoliation for free!
I suppose making the recipient sign a hold-harmless form might not be the best form of this kind of thing……
Clay based kitty litter has worked well on my driveway, but those were just small spots, not Exxon Valdez sized spills.
Left it on for a few months, grinding it in occasionally.
Trex is the answer.
After having experienced Trex on my knees folding up a large tarp laid out on our Trex deck, uh not in sunny southern California. I could not place my hand on the Trex at all it was so hot.
Even up here at 43rd parallel, Trex/vinyl decking is borderline. In SoCal without any sort of shade over it? NO.
I guess my deck is just very well shaded as I have never had even thought about this being an issue.
Ours is about half and half. On a hot sunny day, you wouldn’t even notice under the roof, but the part that’s exposed gets a wee bit toasty if you’re barefoot. Also, while the deckboards themselves have held up pretty well, the decorative side panels (which are much thinner) have warped a bit.
It’s still better than wood for our purposes, but it’s not quite a free lunch.
In dry-enough SoCal, regular wood is the answer. Seriously.
I thought that was Miata? Ha ha
David, you can only do this for so long until it becomes a major issue in most relationships. The good news is that you’re on it to make amends, spend more time with your wife and son, and restore the property. Like the occasional driveway conversations we had when you lived in Troy, we can talk tonight.
I started a Toyota rock crawler project while I was engaged. Couple of months later, not engaged anymore. Got married (to someone else) a few years later, and I did all my wrenching at night after everybody went to bed. She was still furious that I wasn’t in bed with her. I was like, what does it matter? You’d just be asleep anyways. Marriage lasted about a decade. Now I have all the time I want to wrench, but I can’t afford to because she gets half my pay.
Sorry to hear that. I hope David reads this.
This is the reality. Wrenchers take heed.
Wooden decks are horrible – don’t do it.
I imagine it will last a long time in dry LA.
Any wood deck is going to need routine painting or staining. Far more maintenance than concrete – which David already has.
The sun will absolutely destroy any paint or stain on real wood there, expect to redo it every 2 years.
Compared to his usual projects, its nbd. Weekend project.
I live in MN & have a decent deck 1 floor a ove a concrete patio in back. In the 6 years we have lived in this house, the deck has been fully repainted 2x and likely I will want to re-do it again next year.
Even here the sun takes its toll on any painted wood
ENHRN making David need an obituary after that takedown! respect.
We need Elise to write a companion article to get her perspective.
Do we really?
Yes. Alternate perspectives are interesting. Perhaps one can learn to be a better partner from it.
Sounds like we are requesting a roast.
Yes, and?
I’d read it, especially if there were frowny face emoticons pasted over every photo with DT’s face on it.
and she refers to him as “David (Definitely His Real Name)”
Please don’t put a wooden deck on a slab in southern California. Organic debris, vermin, bug fiesta. Tile or have it alternatively finished. Trust this comment.
Totally agree. Just have the concrete professionally cleaned and stain it. You’ll thank yourself.
Tip:
Rent a heated pressure washer and use the highly concentrated liquid dishwasher detergent that restaurants use. It will likely get rid of most of the oil stains.
PS: not a job for Delmar.
Please don’t make this look like your rental on Rochester Rd (LOL). It may be time to convince Beau that the Autopian needs a dedicated place to wrench.
Short story since you’ve been to my garage before. I was replacing the clutch on my 66 GMC, which was not as cut-and-dry as one would think. It meant trial and error of fitting clutches not made for my truck and waiting on some machine work from one of the few places that still do machining around here. Anyway, the truck sat on jack stands in my driveway for a few weeks over a summer because the ceiling was too low in my garage. While sitting in our living room with the window open, my wife hears to women walking by and one says “of course it’s sitting on blocks”. My wife, while not a fan of my car obsession and the issues it brings, shouts “you can fuck off too!” from our couch. Goddamnit, I love her. I don’t really give a shit what my neighbors think, but I do hate to have the city come around and start making problems for me. That would also mean problems for my wife that would be my fault. So… don’t be that guy, David. I also hope your wife sticks up for you like mine does even if she doesn’t like what this hobby does to people like us.
That’s hilarious!
My ’95 F150 sat on jack stands in a neighbor’s driveway for a couple of weeks while I was getting new/swapping tires around on three different vehicles. She’s in her late 80s, doesn’t drive, and we help walk her dog so she didn’t mind at all. As far as I know, no one said a word.
I don’t think she’d have told anyone to fuck off, but she might have politely told them to mind their own business.
I love all these articles over the years even on the old site with will the rusty jeep make it to moab stories. They also make me never want to work on a vehicle project my self again, and I am ok with that.
Oh boy. We’re living parallel lives, but on a different time scale. I always try to keep my house looking reasonable from the front even if there’s a junkyard behind the scenes, I cannot sing my wife’s praises highly enough.
Back in November I bought a long dormant Ford Durango project from a friend with the intention of restoring it. Amazingly my 2 car garage fits 2 cars, so I parked the Durango in the garage and have been slowly disassembling it, but it became clear it needed a LOT of work that I wasn’t prepared for.
So instead I decided to find another Fairmont in better shape to transfer the Durango’s bed and tailgate into, and amazingly I did. It had sat for 7 years and needed work to get back on the road, but it’s now running, driving, and registered again. It was wearing 13″ wire lowrider wheels when I bought it and I ended up permanently staining my driveway using wheel cleaner on them to sell them.
Then I decided I wanted to put an LTD front clip on the Durango. 40 year old Ford sedans aren’t so easy to find, so when I find a $500 roller with a clean body for sale in Arizona I bought it sight unseen and had my friend in Yuma store it. That was peak car count for me – up to 8. A couple of months ago I finally brought it home to take the front clip for myself and strip the rest to sell, so for two weeks I was actively disassembling a car in my driveway. I chopped the whole inner apron and core support off with a Sawzall, and all of those parts are now sitting along the side of my house behind garbage cans. Disposing of the shell was its own sketchy shit show involving a metal scrapper hauling my car away on a full semi-truck flatbed trailer on 3 tires being towed by a Silverado 1500 on its bumpstops.
I also had to buy a shed to store a bunch of parts I had and was planning to buy, so I bought a 5′ tall one which is meant to store rolling trash cans, but is short enough to not be seen behind the fence that creates a small enclosed courtyard in the front of my house.
That courtyard has turned into a work area. I store a small utility trailer in there which just so happens to be about the same size as the Durango’s fiberglass bed insert, so I put the bed on the trailer and have been doing a bunch of fiberglass repairs to it. I then put an EZ-Up canopy over it, enclosed it with plastic drop cloth, and made a little paint booth where I fully primered the bed last Friday, which of course was a 90F day so it was more like a sauna. The current view out of my bedroom window is very similar to yours.
I was planning to actually start cutting the body of the Fairmont soon to start transferring the bed over, but now I have to put the Durango on pause because my Lemons team was one of only 45 accepted into the 24 Hours of Lemons special one-time 20th Anniversary race at Laguna Seca in October. I had previously retired it from racing (and myself as team captain) but FOMO got the best of me and now I have to pull it out of mothballs, requiring me to store one of my other cars elsewhere in the meantime. So the Durango and its bed will have to stay put for now, and I’ll have to store kick one of my other cars out of the driveway and store it elsewhere in the meantime.
Somehow my wife has been supportive or at least tolerant of all of these shenanigans, but she did stipulate that we don’t replace our cracked crappy driveway until there are no more engine swaps planned for the future. That’s more than fair.
When we were at the track day, I was talking to DT about my project car which I acquired recently. He asked if I was going to wrench on it myself, and I believe I replied that I thought I could handle it. In truth, I hadn’t wrenched at all in more than 25 years, but this project made me think that I could give it a shot. So far, I’ve replaced the steering centerlink, tie rod ends, upper and lower A-arms, front shocks, sway bar bushings, brake lines, pads and rotors, and a few other things. There has been blood shed, swearing, sweat, grease, and tears, but I’m getting it. Without the inspiration provided by the Jeep project, I wouldn’t have attempted any of it.
HELL YEA! Way to get after it. This site is a treasure trove of advice, lessons and encouragement. Love live TheAutopian!
I’m so glad I am single. 🙂
Though in my case, the stuff overrunning my current house is all the necessary bits for my new house next door, not car stuff. If you think building a car in your backyard is a chore, try building a house (even with 90% of it hired out, that last 10% is a killer).
two houses? Why isn’t one a garage?
LOL – the old one has a tiny, barely one-car garage. The new one has a 1000sq/ft garage with 13′ of ceiling height for a lift. The whole reason I am building a new house. Houses are 770sq/ft and 1400sq/ft respectively. I wish I had gone a little bigger with the new garage – it’s 28×36, I wish I had gone 28×40 or 42. Though once the financial dust settles, I do plan to add a 14×24 workshop on the back of it.
My place in Maine has a 2700sq/ft garage, but only 8ft ceiling in it. That one is TOO big. Hopefully I will have the happy medium going forward.
Getting there, should be done by Labor Day:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/1erieL3JStuhyyqh7
The old house next door:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/cko18oyLQjXQSH7o9
Looks like a nice upgrade! Just needs a Peugeot in the driveway.
It so does!
Which one is the maine house?
Neither – these are the old and new Florida houses. This is my shack in Maine:
House:
https://flic.kr/p/ogFKEx
Garage:
https://flic.kr/p/Gn8Vgo
The ME garage looks better for you than the house. I am curious, what part of Maine? I’ve been from the NH border up as far as Freeport. And subsequently into Vermont but by a different route.
If I didn’t live almost as far away from you as I can in the continental 48, I feel like we would be good friends. Well, we are, just not in person.
Westbrook. Just west of Portland. I’m from Yarmouth originally, which is the town just before Freeport.
LOL – I have a lot of Internet friends, have met a decent number of them in person over the years due to my work travels. IIRC you are in Seattle? I get out that way occasionally, and have a couple of long-time friends who live there now.
I live in Tacoma, about 20 miles S of the airport. Let me know the next time you make it out here.
Will do!
What a fantastic garage!
Thanks! It’s the reason I bought the house (which to be honest was and mostly still is kind of a dump). I saw that garage, and basically said to my realtor “I hope the house isn’t falling apart, because I am buying it anyway”. There was really nothing else like it in greater Portland that a mere broke mortal could afford 25 years ago.
I have a 3 car garage at our house in MN with 9’7″ ceiling to the bottom of the truss roof.
I’m looking at installing a storage lift in the 3rd bay, even if it means modifying the ceiling trus’ structure, so that my 74′ MG B GT can live on the lift and the kids car can be brought back in to the garage (12′ Prius Plugin).
As long as it is small, I could fit 1 more in with another storage lift in the middle bay, hmmm…
Back when I had my Spitfire and an Alfa Spider, I could just barely stack both of them on the 4-post lift for the winter, as long as the tops were down. Spitfire on the bottom, it marks it’s territory FAR more than the Alfa ever did. But I had a drip pan under the Alfa too “just in case”. At one point I had those two AND a Saab 900T convertible, and a Saab 9-3 SportCombi. Then by the time the garage pic was taken, BMW 328i and M235i, Range Rover HSE, and the Spitfire. A lot of cars have passed through that garage, LOL. The peak was seven for a couple of winters, though that was before the lifts and before a 28×3 workbench got built across the back of the garage. Six cars of mine plus a buddy’s ’48 Chevy. Car skates were key.
The constant being the Spitfire, I’d already had it for five years when I bought this place, despite living in a downtown apartment (thankfully with off-street parking). It wintered at my folk’s place.
Ultimately, I really want another Alfa Spider, just a much nicer one than the one I had before. Which was mechanically great but cosmetically challenged. Near perfect classic sports car for Florida – a lovely highway cruiser, and almost all the later ones have A/C.
I’m a BIG fan of B GT’s – if I wasn’t trying to simplify my life I’d love to have one (with added A/C) here in FL too. But I need my primary fun car to be topless.
That is awesome.
Our old house had a 2.5 car garage. It was about 30’x20′ so 2 DD’s went in the normal way and I had the MG B GT on rollers and it went in the front of the garage ‘sideways’ aka perpendicular the other 2.
Having a convertible of some sort in Florida makes total sense to me. I love the looks of Alfa Spyders too!
NICE! That is quite the upgrade. and jealous of the Maine house and multiple garages. I could park a TON of motorcycles in all that space.
Oh yeah, the Maine garage would be the PERFECT garage for a motorcycle nut, the low ceiling wouldn’t matter. Especially if you put in a hoist so you could store bikes upstairs too (the floor joists are 2x12s, it could hold lots of weight)! I did have a really cool old ’70s Honda stored in it for a while that a friend owned. Pristine original condition bike.
This is it:
https://flic.kr/p/Gn8Vgo
I don’t have any decent overall pictures of the Maine garage, but that gives a good idea. I really need to replace that door trim – eek.
Goals! That would be a great bike garage. Upstairs, “museum” and office space, downstairs workshop. I will finally be looking to buy in the next few years and the only thing I really care about is the garage. Having entry doors wide enough to fit a motorcycle is also important because there will be a show quality classic bike somewhere inside, I just don’t know what bike yet. (pending staying single lol)
Very nice! Definitely good to have goals, and buying your own place is a really good one.
You have to be the 1st person I have ever heard to say “I have a garage that is too big…” 🙂
Honestly everyone I’ve literally ever heard of who built a pole barn / machine shed / ….
Almost invariably at some point post build says “I wish it were bigger” regardless of how large it is…
The problem is the space is poorly allocated. It’s big in floorspace, but that leads to too many cars and too much collected crap. But not enough ceiling height for a proper lift. I got by OK with a scissor lift and a 4-post, but it’s not as good as a 2-post. And the huge garage MASSIVELY increases the taxes on the place (in a state with high taxes), plus that much more building to maintain.
I’m hoping the new one hits the “happy medium”, especially once the woodworking shop gets added to the back down the road. As I have gotten older, my desires have gotten a lot more refined, other than my desire to simplify my life. 🙂
Next Autopian meetup: clean up David’s backyard and build a deck! #TomSawyer #PayDavidAnApple
Your wife is hereby nominated for Sainthood! Not sure if wearing sandals in the work area is a good idea till it’s all cleaned up. Just saying. I have already nominated my sweetie for Sainthood. At one time we had two 240zs, and 2 Mazda RX7s, and 2 66 Mustangs in our garage, back yard and at the curb. The 240z I bought for the engine, was a rust bucket. Disassembled it, sold off all extra parts. Cut up the shell with a sawzall and took it to the dump in the back of vehicle #7. Toyota pickup. Been there. Done that.
Sadly have none of those vehicles now.
The sandals are so that if there’s anything to be found with one’s feet, David will before Delmar does.
Oops, stepped on a poptop! Call the medic! Lol
How has your city not foreclosed on your house?
Some cities are spineless, the city my in laws live in their neighbor has 2 people living in a makeshift shed, 2 more in the garage and trash everywhhere. Also they are drug dealers. Nothing was ever done. Eventually their house caught on fire, only then was it condemned.
Watch out, the UAW might sue you over a factory closing.
I couldn’t help but notice that many of your wrenching shirts are (were) white…
What on earth were you thinking?? 😀 At this point I imagine you’re following the standard t-shirt lifecycle: wear in public, wear around the house, wear to wrench, use as a rag, use as a rag for diff/gear oil or similar, use as a firestarter.
I wonder if it might have been a good idea to hang on to the shed, though. They’re pretty useful.
Also it appears Elise(NHRN) is a tremendously good sport. 🙂
I just bought a six pack of white t-shirts from Costco to wrench in. Cooler in the sun and only $4 each.
> the standard t-shirt lifecycle: wear in public, wear around the house, wear to wrench, use as a rag, use as a rag for diff/gear oil or similar, use as a firestarter.
Same with pants. Never thought it was A Thing until your comment.
I broke down and got 3 pair of pants just this month. My 3 regular pair were 1) nice, expensive pants worn frequently since 2014, 2) enshittified Levi’s that lasted under a year before wear from a cell phone case in my pocket made them grody, 3) nice banana republic chinos I accidentally bleached while cleaning a shower THE DAY I BOUGHT THEM.
Any longtime readers impressed and a bit surprised David knows REKT and DED?
I don’t even know those, so yes, very surprised.
I, too, had to look those up to be sure they meant what I thought they meant. I had to make sure DED wasn’t a reference to David E. Davis, Jr.
what alien who learned about humanity from TikTok has replaced our man of grease and shower spaghetti.
Delmar taught him well.
Seriously, the last step of every wrenching day is putting all of your tools/garbage/spare parts/hardware AWAY or at least having your work space neatly organized and ready for tomorrow.
I cannot tell you in words how well this rule has served me over the years.
Searching over under around and through a vehicle for a 10mm socket that ‘was just here 10 minutes ago/three hours ago/yesterday’ is wasted effort. This effort is also seldom tracked and generally incalculable.
In your case, I imagine it has added HOURS to this restoration.
I don’t have a wheeled tool cart, but have heard that this makes organization and having tools at one’s fingers an optimal solution.
Maybe days or weeks looking at that mess
Regarding the 10mm socket, I’m reminded of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s highly profitable used ballpoint pen business from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I wonder if there are only X number of 10mm sockets in existence, and any time we lose one and have to buy a replacement, we’re actually getting somebody else’s lost item.
If so, your likelihood for losing one would be highly dependent on the speed at which the lost sockets make their way back to the Great 10mm Socket Repository. If demand is high and migration is low, the forces at play would try to increase the number of units in transit, thus making it more likely your socket is going to disappear.
When people start losing their 10mm sockets, it’s dangerous for us all!
There are exactly 42 10mm sockets of any given depth in the universe at any given moment… Always the answer.
I feel like there is no hope for me. I was keeping a pair of scissors in a particular pocket and then spent 10 minutes looking for it mid-job to only realize I had placed them in a different pocket. Even my attempts to stay organized backfire.
Same here. The other day I walked all over my house, cussing and fussing, looking for my glasses, only for my wife to tell me they were on top of my head.
The only thing worse is when they are in your freaking hand. I’ve done that.
I was constantly searching for tools and parts until I got a DeWalt bucket organizer and home depot bucket. Extraordinary quality of life upgrade. Now everything I need for almost every project is in the one bucket with mostly dedicated pockets and I never have to look for anything.
Pretty sure Jeeps of that era didn’t use metric sockets. But point taken. And I have had several 10 mm sockets disappear over the years. Eventually I bought like five of them and all but one of the original sockets reappeared over time. So, I’m set for a while. Probably the rest of my life.
The behavior of 10 mm sockets is best described by quantum entanglement.
This 100%, I try to leave the garage as clean at the end of the night as it was before I started working, and as a result I still know where almost all of my sockets are
This is something that I learned working in my dad’s garage, with my dad’s tools, and my dad’s mess.
I simply learned NOT to be that way and reaped the benefits in my own garage.
One of my relatives had a shop that was like that – everything was everywhere, old broken stuff piled into nooks and crannies… I’m sure he could find whatever he needed, but nobody else could.
I used to be terrible about this and basically cleaned my workshop only when I had a project I couldn’t fit in the remaining uncluttered space. That caused me enough grief with lost tools and aggravation of trying to do projects in cluttered spaces that I now do not consider a project complete until everything has been cleaned and/or put away. That change in mentality has helped a lot.
I knew my marriage would go the distance after the first year (we’ve been married 26 years now) – We lived in a 2-bedroom apartment with our 3-year old kid and that’s when a parts car materialized with everything I needed to convert my 1968 Olds from an automatic to a 4-speed. I spend a few weekends at the shop tearing the car down, and before you knew it our bedroom was starting to fill with parts, including an entire dash pad, new seat backs, a rear sway bar, and a bunch of other stuff I don’t even remember anymore.
She wasn’t thrilled about it, but I too made sure to get the stuff outta there and clean up the evidence once the 4-speed conversion was done. Years later, we have a 2-car garage and I still have huge pieces of Oldsmobile, (along with pieces of Subaru and Miata) but they have a place to live.
That’s love, kids.
My wife graciously put up with a big block Mopar tunnel ram, complete with carbs, air filters, and linkage, on our dining room buffet table for a few weeks before the garage was built. Not going to lie, it may have been there a little longer than needed. I did enjoy staring at it during Sunday dinners.
I don’t know what my most egregious sin was. It was either:
I always enjoy a good over spray silhouette on pavement.
Awesome! Talk about watching your carbs…ha ha
Young wives will tolerate a lot.
Costco clothes you say?
You can get oil out of concrete. Soak a spot with paint thinner, let it sit for a minute, then grind in some oil absorb with your shoe (the stuff from the autoparts store – not cat litter). A square foot or two at a time. It’ll come out.
Get some Purple Power to help clean the concrete
To bad Stain-O-Flage wasn’t available yet to protect your concrete.
David, The Autopian also needs to offer Stain-O-Flage as an epoxy floor coating finish!