Let’s face it: It doesn’t matter how much space you have the garage is always full. Cars take up a lot of space. Add in some tools, garbage and recycling bins, extra tires and wheels, lawnmowers and bicycles and even your two car garage barely fits one car in it anymore.

If you live out in the country like I do and have a bit of land you could build another garage, or a large shed to house that junk. If you live in the city, your options are pretty limited, a shed is about as far as you will get.

But what about going up? An automotive lift is not just for working on your car, it can provide storage in otherwise useless space, that space between the roof of your car and the ceiling of your garage. Even I, despite having a large garage, have enough “junk” that fitting two cars can be difficult. Fitting three cars in it is, well, impossible. My other half doesn’t want to scrape snow off her car in the winter anymore and I don’t want my sports car sitting out in the weather untouched for a good chunk of the winter. Add in a racecar and I really was looking for a solution.

Enter the four-post lift. I did some shopping around and directlift.ca seemed to offer the best pricing I could find semi-locally and their four-post lift offered some great features. I opted for their Pro Park 8 Plus Long, a lift that is capable of lifting up to 8,000 lb (3,600 kg), has 16-foot long ramps, a drive through width of 80.5-inches and a lifting height of 81 inches under the runways. This lift would allow me to fit the racecar in the sky in the winter and still park my sports car underneath while parking our daily driver in the other bay.

So there we have it, I made my decision to buy a four-post lift, it could be used for storage and as luck would have it, it could be used to change oil and other minor maintenance as well. Ceiling height in my garage was a concern, I have just over 10-feet of clearance which varies throughout due to the grade of the floor that slopes from the back to the front of the garage.

Being located in Ottawa I had to get the lift from Toronto to Ottawa somehow, I considered making the drive myself but the delivery charge was only $300 to a local shipping terminal, by my calculations it would cost $200 just in fuel to travel from Ottawa to Toronto and back towing a trailer so that decision was easy enough.

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I called Direct Lift on Monday afternoon, on Tuesday the lift was shipped, on Wednesday morning at 7:30am the shipping terminal called to tell me my lift had arrived!

Lucky for me I have a friend with a flatbed car hauler, I hooked up my truck and headed over to the terminal at lunch on Thursday. When I arrived it was as simple as giving my name and they loaded the 2,000 lb shipped weight onto the trailer. The forklift operator commented that he was glad I brought a proper trailer, he joked that what most people bring is just silly and very dangerous. Not more than 15-minutes later the lift was loaded, strapped down safely and I was on my way.

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