LINCOLN – Imagine getting your car washed and maybe detailed while you sit and have an ice cream cone or burger, then you’ll have a pretty good idea of the tentative planning behind Charles Gillmor’s latest project.

The co-owner of Gillmor’s Restaurant at 236 West Broadway is investing $300,000 to $500,000 to add a third large dining room to his eatery and relocate the ice cream and fast-food manufacturing and sales done at his farm and restaurant to his newly expanded Lincoln Car Wash at 199 West Broadway.

The five bays at the carwash are being upgraded with new equipment, and an unheated indoor area for vacuum cleaning and rug shampooing is being added. Work there began early this month and is ongoing. Gillmor hopes to have it and the restaurant expansion finished by the end of spring.

“We don’t have a master plan all worked out just yet,” Gillmor said Tuesday. “There are some things that we have figured out and some things that we are still discovering.”

Not counting seasonal employees, the consolidation and expansion will require Gillmor’s to add about 15 full- and part-time workers – short-order cooks, chefs, waiters and carwash attendants – to the 39-member work force, said Gillmor’s wife, Catherine, who co-owns the businesses.

The third dining area might become a conference or party room for private bookings. Combining ice cream and fast food at the carwash will allow Gillmor’s more much-needed kitchen space and to concentrate on slower-paced, though not necessarily more upscale, dining, she said.

More businesses might be added to the carwash area, which is located on a 3-acre lot suitable for further additions. It will hold about 40 vehicles, Charles Gillmor said.

“We are going to see how things all come together and go from there,” he said.

The Gillmors aren’t expanding their Lincoln interests in response to Wal-Mart’s plan to create 175 new full- and part-time jobs as it transforms its 55,000-square-foot West Broadway store into a 24-hour 99,000-square-foot Supercenter in late 2008, they said.

“I’m sure it will help us in the future,” Charles Gillmor said of the Wal-Mart expansion, “but we’re finding that we can expand our business because we have a market to support it.”

“You sure can’t complain about the number of customers we get here,” Catherine Gillmor said.

For the Gillmors, the expansion reflects a growing confidence in the Lincoln area’s future, one they saw glimmers of when they chose Lincoln over Bangor and moved there to open the Chester Forest Products mill in 1988.

They opened the restaurant in 2005 after making ice cream at their farm for several years after the sale of the mill to W.T. Gardner & Sons in 2001, said Charles Gillmor, a Princeton native who lived in Concord and other parts of Massachusetts from 1955 to 1977.

“Lincoln is a good town to invest in because of its growth and stability and its status as a regional hub,” he said. “Wal-Mart’s coming here certainly shows that they have confidence in the area.”

Much of the area’s growth has been caused by a building boom, primarily along Lincoln’s 14 lakes and ponds, that has resulted in the town issuing 443 building permits from Jan. 1 to Oct. 31, town Economic Development Assistant Ruth Birtz has said. The town issued 349 permits in 2005.

While they are displacing many longtime residents, the lakefront property and in-town sales are bringing new residents and money into the area and spurring other growth, including renovations to housing in and around downtown.

A new veterans’ clinic on River Road, an expanded dental office near Penobscot Valley Hospital, and the hospital’s completing about $4.1 million in renovations and expansions, including a new surgical center, are among the ongoing or most recent expansions in town.