As some of you will know, I have a bit of an obsession. Well several really, but only one that we will write about here! And that obsession is cars. It started out at a young age, and has just got worse over the years. What started out with collecting model cars, then car magazines, now, due to some good fortune, has turned into collecting full size cars.

Actually, a collection is probably a misnomer. These are collections……

What I have is not so much a collection, just a greater ability to buy cars than to sell them, which means I have ended up with rather too many. Certainly more than logic or need would dictate. And cars require somewhere to keep them. So I started with squeezing them into a garage at our house, on the drive and anywhere I could find the space. Latterly they have been stored at a professional storage facility situated between my office and home, where the proprietor has become a friend. It works fine in many ways, picking a car up on a Friday night after work, and dropping it back there Monday morning.

So our plan for some time has been to build garages at our home to house all the cars. Karin seems to think I want to do this just so I can look at and stroke them. But the intention is to make it much easier to use them all, share them with friends and generally make it half sensible to own so many. I have never owned a car just for investment purposes, even though many have luckily turned out to be excellent investments. So I drive all my cars, and if they don’t get driven, they get sold.

It has been well known amongst my friends and associates for a long time that I planned to build garages. So over the last couple of years, I have been inundated with very many helpful suggestions and photos of what I should be building, such as these……

As you will see, not that helpful!

What we have come up with is a set of garages that sit on the footprint of the existing outbuildings at the house, one of the planning requirements.  They look like agricultural buildings and can be converted by a saner, future owner to stables or genuine outbuildings. Having said that, I am very excited about what we are going to build and the fact that I will have all my cars at home with me. The garages will look like this

They will be of simple, oak construction and just designed for the cars – although with a little space for me too. Having been married 30 years, been together 35 years and known each other over 40 years, Karin continues to surprise me. She took it upon herself to utilise some spare space in the garages to create what she calls the “man cave”. She has designed it, sourced the kit and is in some ways more excited about it than I am! It has been suggested that this is because it will keep me out of the house, but hard to believe that could be true…….

So what will be in the garages? I bought my first car when I was 18. £600 for a classic mini of indeterminate miles and failing bodywork that lasted about 12 months. Since then I have bought a further 68 cars, which works out at nearly 2 every year, although most of them have been sold. I’m not sure whether I should go on here as Karin, although very supportive of my bad habit, has never been told the full truth. Oh well, a blog should be about truth, so here goes. As of today, I own 18 road cars, and 3 race cars. Not counting Karin’s Volvo and the kids’ cars. And Karin’s two favourite vehicles, which will have their own space to live in too.

It has been suggested that the real reason we are building a new home is simply so that I can build garages for the cars. That’s clearly not the case. That would be like suggesting that Karin is not obsessed with George Clooney’s looks, but just his coffee maker……   The Real Reason?