Recent content by matthewp

Glad that I'm not the crazy one here. I really appreciate people chiming in with their experiences as it gives some perspective and approaches. I'm not discounting that the job will have some complexities but wow! I'm waiting on a few more bids that I'll share. If anyone has recommendations...

First quote came back at an eye watering $98,000! I think this is a combo go-away number and a factor of us living in a pretty "ritzy" area outside of Pittsburgh where people might spend that kind of $. Copied the quote below. I think one small part of the problem is I picked a 50x50 area to...

Here's a version of the survey / rough placement of things as a PDF. Hopefully that works. Appreciate the feedback, I'm hoping to come in under 20 but I feel like any of the variables could blow us up pretty quickly.

@Dreamer1975 -- thank you for the input I'm trying to make way for a building similar to yours. @pmiranda -- wow! Both crews I talked to mentioned drainage along the high side of the driveway along with geogrid so we'll see what that looks like when the bids come in.

After pausing plans to build a smaller garage (and some good feedback from GG members), I've got a few bids out to push a gravel driveway down into the back of our property + level out a spot to allow us to build a larger garage. The attached doc shows rough placement of the proposed driveway...

Thanks all! I'm going through with the current zoning variance request just to see where it lands, but the further I go, the more I think we may need to step back and re-evaluate. I've been in the mode of "what can we build this spring" and I think that's landed me in a spot where there are...

Thanks to all for the replies and feedback. I would love to do a bank bark / basement under garage type structure (likely on another part of the property) but the few contractors I have talked to seemed very weary of that type of build. I've tried to seek out people in the Pittsburgh area that...

It's not quite a cliff, but it's about a 20% slope backing up to an environmentally sensitive area so a lot of earthwork is going to be tough to get buy off on. The size is definitely smaller than I would like but if I can make it work under our budget I'll feel ok with it. The options are...

It's been five years since you guys helped me do some digging into the strange garage on my old property in Pittsburgh Since then, I've been a constant lurker here and we've moved out of the city, renovated a house and now we're finally getting around to building some extra garage space. We...

It is definitely cool, we're all over the place in terms of what to do with it, but if we decide we're going to stay in this house I'm going to have a go of making it useful again while retaining as much originality as possible. That's the only door in, but the hill that it's on would have been...

Hi All, I'm a long time lurker and I finally jumped in to share some photos of my garage to see if anyone had ever seen anything like it. We're located in Pittsburgh, PA. It apparently was built in 1911 and is made of concrete with steel reinforcements. It's about 12x18 and about 12 feet...