New house, new problems Options

[The Iron Goat]

So the wife and I just closed on a house about two weeks ago, and the DSL just now got hooked up, so I'm a little behind on things. But allow me to get to the core issue at hand. Our niftly little house has a niftly little 2.5 car garage in the back - a luxury that we weren't afforded in the apartment.

Now, my little grease monkey hands wants to do all kinds of fun stuff with my car in the garage, but there is a small problem. There's a whopping 8-9ft between our house and the next, and my baby is just a LITTLE too loud to drive between them. I don't just mean a little irritating. It shakes the plates in our kitchen cabinets. Cool as that may be, this is a sure fire way to kill any good relations we have with our neighbors.

I would ignore this, but the loudness of the exhaust has been bothering me a lot lately. It's just too much noise for a daily driver. So my question it this: is there a good way to tone it down 20-30 notches without robbing a lot of power? I remember akamiami saying he had installed two resonators in his car with good results, but I don't remember the details or the cost. I've thought about plumbing in a conventional muffler in place of the test pipe, and swapping out when I want to have some fun. Let me know your ideas.