Hi all!
I've been browsing this forum on and off for a few years and have wanted to start a thread for a while to share my garage project.
My name is Kjetil, I'm 31, and I live on the west coast of Norway. I'm a mechanical engineer working mostly in 3d design. I've always loved cars. As a kid, I had hundreds of die-cast models, in all different shapes and sizes. The most exciting ones were the 1:18-scale models, which came in boxes with a window in the side so you could admire the wonderful things within. I never kept them in the boxes of course, most of them were well-used. Now that I'm technically an adult, I have a few 1:1 scale cars. None of them came in boxes. So I wanted to make one.
I'm a "style AND substance" kind of guy. Functional things should look nice, and nice-looking things should function well. My motivation behind building the garage was not only to get a functional structure in which I can keep cars and tools and projects, but the structure should also be fun and pretty. I wanted a space with natural light and I wanted to be able to open one or more walls (beyond the garage door). The ideal placement for it was west of my house. I have a glass door and deck on that side, for the 2-3 days per year of not-rain and not-wind (pick one) that we get on the west coast. I had some fairly outlandish ideas, but eventually came up with a simple solution.
Sliding glass doors! It checked all my boxes. Lots of natural light? Check. Open the side wall? Check. And it also made me giggle. Sliding glass doors in a garage? Very silly. It would allow me to indulge one of my eccentricities by letting me look at my cars from the comfort of my living room.
In recent years, the rules for building freestanding structures on your land were relaxed somewhat, which means that if you build within certain dimension limits, you can build without applying. Nationally, the max area you can build is 50m2 (538sqft), but locally it's 35m2 (376sqft). At least that's what I could parse from reading the enigmatic local building laws. I don't enjoy doing paperwork, so I settled on a 5m wide and 7m long space (16x23ft). I sent an email to my local building bureaucrat and he replied "what you are describing seems to fall within the no-application-needed ruleset." Eh. Good enough!
Originally, the idea was to keep my one summer toy there the whole year and parking the daily driver there in the winter to avoid having to deal with ice and snow. The deity pulling my strings obviously thought that was lazy, and instead made me buy a second, bigger toy before the garage was done. I wanted be able to fit 3 cars in there, in a pinch (putting one of the smaller ones on dollies, turning it 90deg and shoving it into the back). That would only apply in a "storage" scenario, but I like having the option. Having two cars in there permanently was not really the plan. But realistically, there was never going to be enough space anyway. Although I like the idea of minimalism, that's not really me. More room means room for more stuff.
The original toy!
The roof structure was the source of most of my headscratching in the project. From my initial research on material costs for standard garage solutions, I thought the roof was where I could save some money. Make no mistake, I wanted to build this on as low a budget as I could get away with. I'm pretty frugal, and I can't defend throwing money at something just because I'm too lazy to find out whether it could cost less. I also wanted to limit the height to not lose more of the evening sun than is obscured by my neighbour's house/garage, and to avoid having a big slab of garage wall close to my house. And I wanted it to face away from my house in case my budget solution turned out ugly.
Here's my house. It's a 4-section terraced house, where I have the end section away from the road. It was built in 1953, but has been upgraded significantly since then. I bought it in 2015. It had a new front door, sitting on the kitchen floor. It had a huge new kitchen, but no handles on the cabinets. It had a refinished bathroom, but the ventilator wasn't mounted. All the plumbing and most of the electrical system was new. During the open house, everyone had to enter through the side door, as the floor in the hall had been cut away. All the interior doors were missing, almost all the mouldings were missing, and all the walls needed prep and paint. In an unusual move, I let my head rule my heart and I bought it.
Suddenly it was three years later, and all the unfinished stuff was finished. And I was very satisfied with the house. Except for the lack of a garage. Position of the garage shown in red.
I started in early April 2019, by removing a few trees that were close to my neighbour's garage and digging away some soil to avoid hitting the garage with the small digger I was going to rent.
After what felt like no time at all, it looked like this.
And at that point, I thought it would just be embarrassing to rent a digger, so I kept going.
This was the result of three weeks of after-work hand digging. That's dug down to bedrock. I knew the soil was shallow here, but it was a surprise that it was so even.
Then it took me about 2 months to get rid of the dirt. It ***** having a car without and trailer hitch. And it ***** having a driveway that's too narrow for trucks.
But by the summer, the dirt was gone and I'd found a contractor with extra small trucks to deliver a few loads of gravel. That's my dear old dad using the gravel compacting device.
We built formwork for a 10cm (4") slab, sloping very slightly towards the garage door side. Added plastic and rebar. and added two 50mm pipes for electrical to the rear left corner. I am planning to put a separate fuse box there.
My narrow driveway was also too narrow for the concrete truck, but the man had just enough hose extensions to reach.
I really like this picture. This was a very, very good day.
At this point, the roof structure was still not decided, so I put a runoff pipe to each back corner of the slab.
I put premade concrete blocks on the slab, and attached them using rebar fastened in the slab before adding concrete in them and on top of them to ensure they were level. I parked project no. 4 on there, and then spent half a year panicking at how small the (very small) Mazda made it look.
More to follow!
I've been browsing this forum on and off for a few years and have wanted to start a thread for a while to share my garage project.
My name is Kjetil, I'm 31, and I live on the west coast of Norway. I'm a mechanical engineer working mostly in 3d design. I've always loved cars. As a kid, I had hundreds of die-cast models, in all different shapes and sizes. The most exciting ones were the 1:18-scale models, which came in boxes with a window in the side so you could admire the wonderful things within. I never kept them in the boxes of course, most of them were well-used. Now that I'm technically an adult, I have a few 1:1 scale cars. None of them came in boxes. So I wanted to make one.
I'm a "style AND substance" kind of guy. Functional things should look nice, and nice-looking things should function well. My motivation behind building the garage was not only to get a functional structure in which I can keep cars and tools and projects, but the structure should also be fun and pretty. I wanted a space with natural light and I wanted to be able to open one or more walls (beyond the garage door). The ideal placement for it was west of my house. I have a glass door and deck on that side, for the 2-3 days per year of not-rain and not-wind (pick one) that we get on the west coast. I had some fairly outlandish ideas, but eventually came up with a simple solution.
Sliding glass doors! It checked all my boxes. Lots of natural light? Check. Open the side wall? Check. And it also made me giggle. Sliding glass doors in a garage? Very silly. It would allow me to indulge one of my eccentricities by letting me look at my cars from the comfort of my living room.
In recent years, the rules for building freestanding structures on your land were relaxed somewhat, which means that if you build within certain dimension limits, you can build without applying. Nationally, the max area you can build is 50m2 (538sqft), but locally it's 35m2 (376sqft). At least that's what I could parse from reading the enigmatic local building laws. I don't enjoy doing paperwork, so I settled on a 5m wide and 7m long space (16x23ft). I sent an email to my local building bureaucrat and he replied "what you are describing seems to fall within the no-application-needed ruleset." Eh. Good enough!
Originally, the idea was to keep my one summer toy there the whole year and parking the daily driver there in the winter to avoid having to deal with ice and snow. The deity pulling my strings obviously thought that was lazy, and instead made me buy a second, bigger toy before the garage was done. I wanted be able to fit 3 cars in there, in a pinch (putting one of the smaller ones on dollies, turning it 90deg and shoving it into the back). That would only apply in a "storage" scenario, but I like having the option. Having two cars in there permanently was not really the plan. But realistically, there was never going to be enough space anyway. Although I like the idea of minimalism, that's not really me. More room means room for more stuff.
The original toy!
The roof structure was the source of most of my headscratching in the project. From my initial research on material costs for standard garage solutions, I thought the roof was where I could save some money. Make no mistake, I wanted to build this on as low a budget as I could get away with. I'm pretty frugal, and I can't defend throwing money at something just because I'm too lazy to find out whether it could cost less. I also wanted to limit the height to not lose more of the evening sun than is obscured by my neighbour's house/garage, and to avoid having a big slab of garage wall close to my house. And I wanted it to face away from my house in case my budget solution turned out ugly.
Here's my house. It's a 4-section terraced house, where I have the end section away from the road. It was built in 1953, but has been upgraded significantly since then. I bought it in 2015. It had a new front door, sitting on the kitchen floor. It had a huge new kitchen, but no handles on the cabinets. It had a refinished bathroom, but the ventilator wasn't mounted. All the plumbing and most of the electrical system was new. During the open house, everyone had to enter through the side door, as the floor in the hall had been cut away. All the interior doors were missing, almost all the mouldings were missing, and all the walls needed prep and paint. In an unusual move, I let my head rule my heart and I bought it.
Suddenly it was three years later, and all the unfinished stuff was finished. And I was very satisfied with the house. Except for the lack of a garage. Position of the garage shown in red.
I started in early April 2019, by removing a few trees that were close to my neighbour's garage and digging away some soil to avoid hitting the garage with the small digger I was going to rent.
After what felt like no time at all, it looked like this.
And at that point, I thought it would just be embarrassing to rent a digger, so I kept going.
This was the result of three weeks of after-work hand digging. That's dug down to bedrock. I knew the soil was shallow here, but it was a surprise that it was so even.
Then it took me about 2 months to get rid of the dirt. It ***** having a car without and trailer hitch. And it ***** having a driveway that's too narrow for trucks.
But by the summer, the dirt was gone and I'd found a contractor with extra small trucks to deliver a few loads of gravel. That's my dear old dad using the gravel compacting device.
We built formwork for a 10cm (4") slab, sloping very slightly towards the garage door side. Added plastic and rebar. and added two 50mm pipes for electrical to the rear left corner. I am planning to put a separate fuse box there.
My narrow driveway was also too narrow for the concrete truck, but the man had just enough hose extensions to reach.
I really like this picture. This was a very, very good day.
At this point, the roof structure was still not decided, so I put a runoff pipe to each back corner of the slab.
I put premade concrete blocks on the slab, and attached them using rebar fastened in the slab before adding concrete in them and on top of them to ensure they were level. I parked project no. 4 on there, and then spent half a year panicking at how small the (very small) Mazda made it look.
More to follow!
Thanks for posting.
