Dave_Car_Guy
Well-known member
Hi all. I've been lurking here for a long time, happy for all the great ideas and help, so I guess it's about time for me to join in. By way of intro, I thought I'd share my garage build. I'll do this in a few posts as I get time...
It started in 2012, as others here have said: when my wife wanted to build a new house. All good with me, as long as I get to build a new detached garage! I had been starting to collect few cars and had them stored in a warehouse but that was highly unsatisfying. I wanted garage to work in, to entertain in, to play poker in, to watch TV in. It needed to be far enough from the house and the bedrooms so that my noise working nor coming/going would wake anyone. It needed full AC and heat, and a bathroom with shower to be fully self-contained. It needed big sound capabilities for SONOS and TV watching. It needed floors that would survive oil and gas as well as poker-night beer and peanuts messes to be easily washed out.
We found a one-acre lot with a knock-down ranch house about a mile outside of our town's downtown area, but still feeling rural, and 30 miles from San Francisco.
The lower section of the lot was perfect for a detached garage of 70' x 30', which would be about 100 feet away from the main house.
My only problem was that town regulations limited separate structures to 15-feet high. So, given that, I couldn't make the garage as wide as I wanted (40 feet) or it would require a very flat roof (I wanted 10 feet ceilings, just enough if I ever added a small lift), so a 15-foot max high structure that was 40 feet wide would have had a very flat roof. We settled on 30-wide so the 5 feet above the ceiling line to the roof peak had some reasonable roof slope/pitch, and figured we could offset some of the flatness with gable features. With the lot surrounded on 3 sides by roads, I was going to also have to do a lot of landscaping to get some privacy. We knocked down the old house and prepped for foundation:
Foundation poured for a 70x30 structure. The idea is to make essentially 3-car garage entrance, but make the garage then 3-cars deep (hence 9 cars), and leave 10 feet of the rear as a storage room (10x20) with a 10x10 full bathroom.
I didn't get too dirty doing any work, but this shows the end of the garage where the three bay doors will be.
We wanted the garage to not appear to just be a garage, so we designed teh externals to make it look like a complete guest house (and since it has heat, air, and water, I suppose it could always be converted into a full house some day). So framing looked like this, inside and out.
Once it was enclosed, you get a sense of what it started to look like, particularly from the "business end" of things. You can also now see what I mean when I say a wider structure would have a flatter roof (imagine stretching that wider but keeping the peak at 15-feet).
You can also see where it is shaping up relative to the house up above. (back of house in foreground, garage in distance downhill)
I'll post the next steps in just a bit. Hint: the place is finished so I'll get through this build thread quickly!!
It started in 2012, as others here have said: when my wife wanted to build a new house. All good with me, as long as I get to build a new detached garage! I had been starting to collect few cars and had them stored in a warehouse but that was highly unsatisfying. I wanted garage to work in, to entertain in, to play poker in, to watch TV in. It needed to be far enough from the house and the bedrooms so that my noise working nor coming/going would wake anyone. It needed full AC and heat, and a bathroom with shower to be fully self-contained. It needed big sound capabilities for SONOS and TV watching. It needed floors that would survive oil and gas as well as poker-night beer and peanuts messes to be easily washed out.
We found a one-acre lot with a knock-down ranch house about a mile outside of our town's downtown area, but still feeling rural, and 30 miles from San Francisco.
The lower section of the lot was perfect for a detached garage of 70' x 30', which would be about 100 feet away from the main house.
My only problem was that town regulations limited separate structures to 15-feet high. So, given that, I couldn't make the garage as wide as I wanted (40 feet) or it would require a very flat roof (I wanted 10 feet ceilings, just enough if I ever added a small lift), so a 15-foot max high structure that was 40 feet wide would have had a very flat roof. We settled on 30-wide so the 5 feet above the ceiling line to the roof peak had some reasonable roof slope/pitch, and figured we could offset some of the flatness with gable features. With the lot surrounded on 3 sides by roads, I was going to also have to do a lot of landscaping to get some privacy. We knocked down the old house and prepped for foundation:
Foundation poured for a 70x30 structure. The idea is to make essentially 3-car garage entrance, but make the garage then 3-cars deep (hence 9 cars), and leave 10 feet of the rear as a storage room (10x20) with a 10x10 full bathroom.
I didn't get too dirty doing any work, but this shows the end of the garage where the three bay doors will be.
We wanted the garage to not appear to just be a garage, so we designed teh externals to make it look like a complete guest house (and since it has heat, air, and water, I suppose it could always be converted into a full house some day). So framing looked like this, inside and out.
Once it was enclosed, you get a sense of what it started to look like, particularly from the "business end" of things. You can also now see what I mean when I say a wider structure would have a flatter roof (imagine stretching that wider but keeping the peak at 15-feet).
You can also see where it is shaping up relative to the house up above. (back of house in foreground, garage in distance downhill)
I'll post the next steps in just a bit. Hint: the place is finished so I'll get through this build thread quickly!!
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