Now What: The Lift

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My car lives four feet off the ground now, up on a four post car lift in the middle of our garage renovation. That was, without question, the most practical decision I made all summer.

I know how that sounds. We are mid-construction on the garage. It’s the kind of project that starts with “let’s just clean this out” and ends with you standing in a construction zone wondering how you got here. Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, I decided the right move was to buy a four-post lift and put my car in the air. Not detail it. Not sell it. Just… elevate it. Like it’s a piece of art now. Like we’re precious.

Here’s the thing though. I am precious about this car, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

This is the same car, or at least the same idea of a car, that started with my grandfather’s Jeep. He taught me to drive stick in that thing, on a gravel road. He was patient in a way I didn’t appreciate, not until I was old enough to be impatient with other people myself. My first car was a four-speed Corvette, a car I had zero business owning at sixteen and every reason to love anyway. Decades later, it’s still a manual, still mine, and still parked in a garage that I am currently assembling.

So when my husband started talking about dust and debris and “you’ll probably want to move your vette somewhere safe for a few weeks,” I didn’t do the reasonable thing. The reasonable thing is parking it in the driveway under a cover and hoping for the best. I did the other thing instead. I put it in the sky.

And it’s the best decision in the whole project.

Why a Four Post Car Lift Made Sense

It’s safe up there. Actually safe, not “I parked a tarp over it and I’m hoping” safe. It’s completely out of the footprint of the work being done, which means the crew isn’t tiptoeing around a Corvette while they’re running conduit. And I can bring it back down anytime I want with the push of a button. That button runs on the same hydraulic and cable system that powers every four post car lift like this one, which is a sentence I did not expect to be true of my life this year. There’s something almost funny about it: the car that requires the most manual, hands-on, old-school driving I own is now controlled by a button. My grandfather would have opinions.

The Smaller, Sillier Truth

But underneath the practical case, there’s a smaller, sillier truth: I like that it’s up there. I like walking past it while everything else in the garage is in pieces. Torn-out shelving, paint cans, a floor that isn’t a floor yet. And there it is: the one thing in the room that’s finished. Whole. Not a project. Just a car I love, holding still while I rebuild everything around it.

That feels like a fairly accurate metaphor for turning fifty, if I’m being honest. You don’t get to pause everything while you figure out what “now what” actually means. Life keeps renovating around you whether you’re ready or not. But you can decide what gets to stay steady. What gets lifted up and out of the mess while the rest of it gets sorted. For me, right now, that’s a thirty-year relationship with a stick shift and the memory of a man who taught me to drive one.

The four post car lift solved the storage problem. It got the car up, out of the way, and safe for the duration of the build.

But now that I’ve started elevating cars in my own garage, apparently I don’t stop. We’re shopping for a scissor lift next. Something lower and more workable, the kind you use for wheels off and actual hands-on detailing rather than long-term storage. Because it turns out once you’ve got one car floating above the chaos, you start thinking about what else deserves that kind of attention.

More on that once we’ve picked one.