In 2004 or so, my father-in-law and I were talking about cars. I remember Morris pulling out a car magazine and showing me an ad for Factory Five and he said, ‘You should build one of these.’ The idea intrigued me but it clearly would take a bunch of planning, including a place to do the work. In 2006, we moved to CA for year, me for a sabbatical and my wife for a medical fellowship. When we returned from CA, I got serious about the idea of building the Cobra. I ordered the parts and they arrived in October 2008.
My first shop was our two car garage.
The main road to our house was up a winding county road. The semi delivering the parts couldn’t make some of the tight turns so I rented a U-Haul and three friends of mine and I met the semi in Boulder and transferred the parts from the semi to the U-Haul and drove up the canyon to our house where we put everything in the garage. The garage was well insulated but had no built-in heat so I used several space heaters to take the chill off. Unfortunately, winters at 7,200 ft. in the Rockies can be quite cold so there were many days, even with the space heaters, that it was just too cold to work on the car. Plus, my wife needed to be able to park her car in the garage so for much of the winter I was in half of the garage area.
My wife and I bought our house in 1993 and it consisted of a small main house and an even smaller ADU. We’d rented the ADU out for a number of years but decided on our return from CA to not do so. There was a guest room on the top floor and the bottom had an office, kitchen and bathroom, and my wife thought that we could remodel the lower part to make a shop and hobby area. So, we did that in the Spring of 2009.
The shop was a great place to work! Classic Motorsports wrote that they wanted to showcase home autoshops and asked for photos and descriptions of places. I decided to send in my shop under the small shop category and they published a short piece on it. Then, on Labor Day 2010, the Fourmile Fire ran through our community, destroying 170 homes, ours included. The fire was so hot that the aluminum subframe of the Cobra sublimated.
It took two years but we built a new home on the same spot as our old house. The new configuration had a space that could be used as a shop but it was flexible enough that it could be turned in to an en suite guest space. We weren’t sure what we were going to do including building a separate shop space adjacent to the house.
While I was dithering, my wife got a job in Salt Lake City and I decided to finally retire. When looking for a house to buy, one requirement was a garage that I could convert to a shop. The house that we eventually bought had a two-car garage that had been used for housing limousines. As a result, it was deeper than the usual garage (at 30 ft.). The downside was that it was not particularly structurally sound and had a lot of cabinets, etc., in it that needed to be removed. There were no windows or heating and cooling. Just a single light bulb. Lot of rodents liked the place, too.
So, I immediately had a project! We hired a carpenter to help me get the garage in shape. First, we strengthened the walls and put in an attic space for storing things. We put in two windows, I insulated the walls and painted the sheetrock. I hired an electrician to put in the new lighting; a mini-split did the HVAC work. The concrete was a mess and I acid washed it and then put on an epoxy paint. I also needed to furnish the shop with tools. We were only planning to stay in SLC for 3 or 4 years but then COVID hit and my wife worked at the hospital through that; seven years in total in SLC. I got the new Cobra chassis and body in 2017 and the engine in 2022.
Over the years we spent a lot of time in the Moab area and we decided to look for property to visit with our camper. In 2018 we found a vacant lot outside of Moab. We loved the spot and decided to build a small vacation house. It became our COVID project. Once the house was done and we were thinking about leaving SLC, we also started to consider what to do about a shop. My wife’s sister said, in a fateful discussion, that we need more guest space because ‘lots of people will want to visit’. We also considered that the Sunshine house really wasn’t well configured for a shop so we decided to build a combined guest/shop on the Moab property.
We sold our SLC house in 2023 and I moved the shop and car to storage in SLC. It was in storage for about 14 months before the shop was finally complete. The new shop has roughly 20% more floor area than the SLC shop and is more spacious with much better lighting. As you can see, there is also a lot of cabinet storage. Barn doors on the end allow me to open the space up on nice days.
I’m writing this in Nov. 2026. It’s hard to believe that it has been 18 years since I put the first car in the garage in Sunshine!
