Enkaji Engari (Car House=Garage)

While the Kleinerts were visiting us, Matt was hard at work. Many days there is little to do for the program so he decided to do more jobs around the house. The first thing on the list was to build a garage for our new car. Having never built much of anything from scratch, much less, a garage, this was a challenge. However, after a few weeks of hard work, our car is safely housed away from the sun.
Step one was buying materials. I was hoping to construct a basic structure, 6 poles in two parallel lines with cross bars along the parallel lines and two along the back. I would cement the poles into the ground, then construct a web of barbed wire to hold up sheets of sheets of poly-paper (the plasticy stuff you use for greenhouses). I bought the poles from a local guy and had them brought to our house. They were cedar and smelled wonderful when you cut them. After digging holes for the six posts, I cut joints into the crossbars so they would sit flat on top of the vertical posts. After nailing the cross bars to the vertical posts I mixed up some cement and cemented the posts in.
Step two was erecting the barbed wire. I basically wrapped the wire around the posts and made an asterisk-shaped roof. On top of that I laid 3 sheets of poly-paper. The sheets were about 2m wide so I laid them perpendicular to the rows of poles (left to right) instead of front-to-back. I wrapped each end of the paper around a crossbeam and then nailed them into the beam using small pieces of scrap wood I scrounged from an old sofa. To help keep the plastic from blowing too much, I put a few more strands of barbed wire on top of the paper and then sewed the joints between the 3 sheets using string.
The last step was the sides. One of the sides was basically against our house and one side would need to remain open to allow the car to get in. However, along the other two sides I decided to plant passion fruit. Passion fruit grow in vines and are ready to harvest after 12 months (I hope). We had plenty of seedlings at the project nursery so I built up some beds and transplanted 10 seedlings.
After all this, my car has a home. The wind is still pretty rough on the plastic roof, but it feels good to have made something with my own hands.