A West Des Moines homeowner called us last year about putting an auto lift into a garage that did not exist yet. He builds out overland rigs — a lifted Tacoma on 35s, a 4Runner in progress, and a project Land Cruiser waiting its turn — and he was tired of rotating tires on jack stands in a gravel driveway. The building was still a set of drawings. That is the best phone call we get, because almost every problem we solve on residential installs traces back to a decision made before the concrete was poured. This is how that project actually went, including the parts we would sequence differently if we did it again, and what it cost him in the categories that matter.
BendPak and Atlas four-post and two-post models sized for residential garages and pole buildings. We install across central Iowa, handle freight, and stock the parts you will eventually need years down the road.
The Vehicles Drove Every Decision
Overland builds break the assumptions that home lift spec sheets are written around. A stock Tacoma is about 70 inches tall. Put a three-inch suspension lift and 35-inch tires under it, throw a roof rack and a rooftop tent on top, and you are pushing 84 inches or more before the wheels leave the ground. Add a rear bumper with a swing-out tire carrier and the vehicle got 14 inches longer than the factory spec anyone would look up. None of that shows up in a quick online configurator.
We measured all three vehicles in his driveway with a tape and a level before we recommended anything. That measurement session changed the whole plan. He had been looking at a standard-length four-post runway, and the Land Cruiser with the rear carrier would have hung off the back. We moved him to an extended-length model with runways long enough to handle the longest vehicle plus a margin. We also had to think about lifted-vehicle approach angles — a rig with 35s and a lift kit has to climb onto the runway ramps, and the steeper the ramp, the more likely you scrape a front skid plate or a winch bumper. Extended ramps solved that. The lesson we keep relearning: measure the actual vehicles, not the vehicles the brochure imagines. An auto lift that fits a sedan does not automatically fit a built truck.
Slab Specification Before the Pour
This is where getting called early paid for itself. The builder’s default garage slab was a four-inch pour, which is fine for parking cars and marginal for lift equipment. We asked for six inches of 4,000 PSI concrete across the entire footprint where the lift would sit, with rebar on 18-inch centers rather than just wire mesh, and a minimum 28-day cure before anybody drilled an anchor hole. That change added a modest amount to the concrete bill and eliminated the single most expensive failure mode in residential installs.
We have been on jobs where the homeowner had a beautiful new garage and a four-inch slab with control joints running exactly through the spot the columns needed to occupy. Fixing that means saw-cutting out a section, forming, pouring a thickened pad, and waiting a month — thousands of dollars and a lost season. Here we just marked the column locations on the plan and told the concrete crew where not to put a joint. We also had them keep the slab flat rather than sloping it toward a drain in the lift area. Floor slope matters more than people think; a four-post can be shimmed at the columns to level the runways, but starting flat makes the whole install cleaner and the locks engage more evenly. If you are planning a shop building, our article on concrete requirements for car lifts covers the specs in more depth.
Ceiling Height and the Overhead Fight
The pole building was going up with 12-foot sidewalls, which sounds generous until you start subtracting. Trusses, purlins, a garage door track, an opener rail, and light fixtures all live in that space. By the time everything was hung, the real usable clearance under the lowest obstruction in the lift bay was closer to 10 foot 8 in a couple of spots.
We ran the numbers with him: 84 inches of vehicle height, plus the runway deck height when the lift is fully raised, plus a few inches of safety margin. That math determined the maximum rise he could actually use, which was less than the equipment’s rated maximum. He was fine with it — he did not need to stand fully upright under the tallest rig, he needed the wheels off the ground at a comfortable working height and enough room to slide a floor jack and a torque wrench around. But knowing that number before ordering meant no unpleasant surprises. Two changes made the space work better: we had him move the garage door opener to a jackshaft-style side-mount unit that lives on the wall next to the door instead of a rail running down the center of the ceiling, and we relocated two light fixtures out of the lift footprint. Both were trivial to do during construction and would have been genuine headaches afterward. Sequencing an auto lift install into a build means you get to move the obstructions instead of working around them.
Power, Air, and the Rough-In Window
He asked the same question everyone asks: do I really need 220? For the four-post he chose, yes. The power unit is a 220V single-phase motor, and we wanted a dedicated 20-amp circuit terminating in a box at the column location. Because the walls were still open, running that circuit cost almost nothing. Doing it later means surface conduit or opening up finished walls, and the price triples.
While the electrician was there we had him add several 120V outlets at four-foot height around the perimeter, a ceiling outlet for a future reel, and a separate circuit for a compressor. The compressor circuit turned out to be the smartest add. Tire rotation on 35-inch wheels with a torque spec in the 90 to 140 foot-pound range is miserable with a breaker bar and pleasant with an impact gun. We also had him rough in a half-inch air line to a drop near the lift bay and a second drop near the bench. Air lines are cheap during framing and irritating afterward. The general rule we give every homeowner planning a build: whatever utilities you think you might want in that bay in the next ten years, run them now. The marginal cost during rough-in is small enough to be a rounding error. Our overview of home garage lift planning has a full rough-in checklist.
Storage Underneath and the Second-Car Question
Like most people building a shop, he wanted to store a vehicle on the lift and park another underneath. That is the classic four-post use case, and it works, but the vertical stack-up is unforgiving. You need the lower vehicle’s height, plus the runway structure thickness, plus the upper vehicle’s height, plus clearance — all inside your usable ceiling.
With a lifted 4Runner parked underneath, the stack did not work. With a normal-height sedan or the daily-driver crossover underneath, it did, with a few inches to spare. We were straight with him about that before he bought, because the most common disappointment we see with residential storage setups is a customer discovering their two favorite vehicles cannot coexist vertically. He was fine with the constraint. The project Land Cruiser lives up top for months at a time while he works on it in bursts, and the daily driver parks underneath. He also added a set of drip trays, which are worth every dollar when an old vehicle is sitting overhead above a clean car. One thing we recommend to every storage user: cycle the auto lift up and down through its full travel at least once a month even if nothing changes. Hydraulics and lock mechanisms that sit at one position for a year develop problems that regular movement prevents entirely.
Install Day and the Freight Reality
Delivery is where residential projects most often go sideways. A four-post ships on an LTL truck as a heavy palletized load — columns, runways, crossmembers, hardware, and a power unit. The runways alone are long and awkward. A residential address with a normal driveway and no forklift is a problem the freight carrier will happily make your problem.
We coordinated a liftgate delivery and scheduled our crew to be on site the same day so the freight went straight from the truck into the building instead of sitting in a driveway waiting on a Saturday. Assembly took most of a day for two techs: set and plumb the columns, install the runways and crossmembers, route and tension the equalization cables, mount the power unit, plumb the hydraulic lines, bleed the system, and then cycle it repeatedly under load while checking that all four locks engage together. That cable tensioning step is the one homeowners underestimate. If the four corners are not equalized, the platform racks slightly, the locks do not seat evenly, and you get uneven wear that eventually becomes a real problem. We finished with a walkthrough on operation, lock verification, and what to look for during the monthly check. Total from first phone call to first vehicle in the air was about five months, almost all of it construction schedule. If you are planning something similar in the Des Moines metro or anywhere in central Iowa, call us early — 800-674-9302. Getting your auto lift into the plan before the concrete truck arrives is the cheapest decision in the whole project.
What We Would Do Differently
Two things. First, we would have pushed harder on sidewall height. Fourteen-foot walls instead of twelve would have added a manageable amount to the building cost and given him full rated rise plus real headroom for stacking taller vehicles. He is happy with the result, but the ceiling is the one constraint he cannot fix later without demolition. Everything else in that building is adjustable. Height is not.
Second, we would have laid out the bench, the tire rack, and the tool storage on paper before the lift location was final. He ended up with a workbench slightly closer to the driver-side runway than ideal, which means squeezing past when a wide-bodied rig is up. It is a minor annoyance, not a defect, but a fifteen-minute layout exercise with a tape measure would have caught it. Beyond that, the project went the way we hoped. He rotates tires on all three rigs in an afternoon instead of a weekend, he does his own gear oil and diff service, and the auto lift has paid for itself in shop labor he no longer outsources. That is the honest outcome we aim for on residential work: not a showpiece, but a tool that gets used constantly and does not create new problems. If you want to talk through a build in progress, email founder@autoliftserv.com or browse options at our four-post collection.
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