The sound of an automatic garage door rumbling opening doesn't normally get the heart rate up.
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But when you know there's something pretty unusual on the other side of the door, it's hard not to take in just a small breath of anticipation.
That was me this week, as I travelled right across the capital in search of Canberrans with truly special and unsual "things" in their garages. The kind of collections so unique and loved they force the family cars out into the driveway to endure the -8 degree overnight temperatures.
I found two Canberrans and a Queanbeyan man willing to let me stick my head in the side door of their garages. And what I found was truly awesome.
1. Yianni, north Canberra
Mechanic Yianni's garage is a complete recreation of one of his earliest childhood memories: sitting on the oily floor of a car workshop in Wellington, NSW, playing with engine parts.
It was the late 1960s but what Yianni has created in his garage in north Canberra is the incredible experience of stumbling across a mechanical garage in Australia in the 1950s.
From a pair of faded navy Ampol work overalls, a complete and immensely rare Shell "lubitorium" to the acrid smell of gasoline, the entire space reflects its owner's obsession with the details of a bygone era.
"I wanted it to feel as though the mechanics had left for the day and you'd just stumbled across it," Yianni says.
"I really wanted it to be true to the era in every way, and to just feel real."
Yianni's hundreds of vintage mechanic's tools, 16 "very rare and very desirable" petrol pumps and a glowing set of retro BP and Golden Fleece promotional signs are housed in a purpose-built garage in a quiet tree-lined street.
The garage features a high-pitched roof (the majority of Yianni's collection is actually suspended from the ceiling) and is lined with aged sheets of corrugated iron that took literally years to collect: "the dull weathered patina of the old garages was hugely important to me".
The collection, now worth "hundreds of thousands of dollars", (Yianni's name has been changed for security reasons) started decades ago with an old Shell petrol pump he found in a ditch near the NSW/Victorian border in the late 1980s.
"I kept driving past it every time I went to Melbourne and I couldn't stop thinking about it," he says.
"That pump inspired something in me, it was a jolt back to my childhood and everything grew from that moment nearly 30 years ago."
Yianni, a self-confessed "motorhead from birth", has travelled the country and the world in search of items for his collection. He can't count the number of times he's driven thousands of kilometres for a rare item and returned empty-handed.
But his most prized possession, a huge porcelain enamel sign for the Neptune Oil Company, believed to have been made in the 1950s, came from just up the road in Yass. It was covered in inches of dust in a residental garage and lusted after by collectors across the country.
"[The collection's] come from everywhere you can imagine, from swap meets to chasing down leads to knocking on people's doors," Yianni says.
"I just love being out here in the garage. It's the aesthetic. It's something I've created and it's pure happiness."
2. Jane Lauinger, Deakin
Jane Lauinger's house is one of those big mid-century places on Stonehaven Circuit. It's lovely, but not, you know, remarkable from the outside. And then the garage door opens.
The family's cars have been banished to the nature strip to make way for a busy, vibrant pop-up interiors store, packed floor-to-ceiling with bold cushions, Australiana ceramics and sensational artwork.
From royal blue cockatoos and light-up goat skulls to luxecycled vintage furniture, the former car garage is a living breathing representation of Lauinger's daring and quirky style, as well as a retail showroom for her business, Spacecadet Interior Design.
Serial house-renovator and interior designer Jane covered the floor in concrete-look vinyl and lined the walls with shelving last winter, initially as a way to showcase interior design pieces to her clients from Canberra and the south coast.
"I got such good feedback that I thought, why not open it up to everybody," Jane says.
Her showroom is an Aladdin's cave of interior design wares from brands like Sydney-based Inartisan and the Gold Coast's Creatively Active Minds, who use century-old archival prints on cushion covers.
Among the photo frames and display bowls are Lauinger's own luxecycled furniture pieces, found at The Green Shed or indeed in a neighbour's skip - "people throw out the most amazing stuff, it's insane" - and lovingly sanded and restored with patterned wallpaper and varnish.
"I love that a piece of furniture will have a story but then I get to reinvent that story," Jane says.
"My luxecycled pieces are my chance to experiment. And I come up with my best ideas in the bath."
The garage/Spacecadet showroom on Stonehaven Circuit doesn't have set hours; Jane puts a sandwichboard sign out the front of the house, pops a 'We're open!' post on Instagram and sits upstairs sipping coffee and reading until the doorbell rings.
3. Tony Whipp, Queanbeyan
Every time Tony Whipp heads downstairs to his workshop in south Queanbeyan, he gets to yell something pretty cool to wife Anna: "I'll just be down in the Tardis," he calls.
Inside the Whipp family garage, against a wall, is an identical replica of the time travel machine from Doctor Who. But open the doors to the Tardis and you're entering the room next door, Tony's workshop, decked out with workbenches, precisely hung tools and a big screen for watching motorsport.
When Tony smashed through the brick wall between the family garage and his workshop in 2016, he joked to his Doctor Who-obsessed daughter Ainsleigh that he planned to turn the entrance into the Tardis.
"The joke was on me - she just wouldn't let it go," Tony says. "She kept harrassing me until I gave in."
The Tardis started life as an old standalone linen cupboard and took eight weeks "on and off" to construct. A perfectionist by nature, Tony's Tardis is identical to the phone box prop from the British science fiction show: right down to the different-sized door handles and a carbon copy lock.
The Tardis's iconic light-up "Police Box" sign was hand-made by Tony and glows at night thanks to LED lights powered by an old Nokia phone battery.
"It's definitely a talking point when I bring friends down to the workshop," Tony says.
"Even people who aren't big Doctor Who fans - like me - think it's super cool."