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My own garage has seen the restoration of quite a few race, rally and autocross cars. It is a place of destruction, action and construction—hopefully in that order. As a result, the garage is often dirty, as the acts of fabricating and creation can be nasty, brutish work that takes nasty, brutish tools.
We have progressed well beyond just making fire in our caves. Let's melt some metal. Sure, I am jealous of other enthusiasts who have super clean and nicely appointed garages that they may call mancaves, although they typically more closely resemble a laboratory or museum. The glossy floors, perfectly sorted tools and framed artwork on the wall appeal to the OCD portion of my soul that I keep hidden away when real work needs to get done.
Nothing really gets done in this garage. It's used to show off pretty trinkets. Large amounts of car restoration work can never get done in a clean garage—at least one that is easily afforded. Working on cars is dirty and the only real solution in a limited amount of space is to either do work and be dirty or do no work and be clean. Not working on cars isn’t an option, so dirty it is. Maybe that’s where the cave thing came from?
That said—we must come up with something with a little more punch to name our working garages. Mancave simply isn’t going to cut it. Unfortunately, all of those Lord of the Rings geeks have ruined the Viking and Norse references, so we can’t really go there without looking like tools.
Even staring inside the brightly-lit garage late in the night, the effect is only partially cave-like. Let's come up with a different term. The name will just have to be coined organically. Unfortunately, since mancave is already out there and used by countless car guys, it’s going take something major to overtake it.
Just brainstorming here. I wonder if my homeowner’s association would get upset with me if I started parking a siege tower in my driveway?
Looking throught my HOA Bylaws—there it is—right after that part about cleaning up after Fluffy.
Section 4, Paragraph 3: Do not park machines of war in your driveway.
It looks like I’ll have to keep looking in open garages to find the person responsible for that rule. I want to meet that guy.
