Would it have been possible to attach the garage to the house to get around any of the variances ?
I'm not really sure. I have definitely seen houses that are like that in my area - one continuous building from the front of the lot all the way back to the alley. I would guess, but am not 100% sure, that they had to get variances to do that. I have seen that, but its not typical. Also when I saw this it was usually in Lincoln Park. That is the neighborhood just south of where I am now and is also where we lived until we moved here. Maybe the zoning requirements for Lincoln Park are a little different? Most of the times when new houses are built by me they have a completely detached garage separate from the house like we do. There is a professional baseball player who bought the 3 million dollar house a few doors down a year ago and his house is designed like that - a separate house and garage. It was new construction.
Even if one building front to back was allowed, or easy to get a variance for, I not have wanted to have a garage that was part of the house. The design of the back of our house just isn't set up for that. If the garage went all the way to the back of our house we would have no windows at all in our family room. The houses that I have seen with garages attached to the back essentially have the garage under or partially under the living space at the back of the house. In my previous house our next door neighbor had that - a four car garage, two spaces in front of the other two, where the floor sloped downwards as you drove in from the alley. The front part of the garage was basically basement and the family room was on top of that part of the garage. I know this house had variances - it was also built with azero lot line so it had a variance for that too. And it was on the same size 25 foot wide and 125 foot deep lot like I have.
I think I mentioned before that while I am happy with the end product I wasn't so happy with my architect. He just didn't seem to know the code when it came to designing my garage. Originally we designed a garage that was more than 519 square feet. The zoning department rejected it because it was too large. I thought to myself - why the hell did we design something that they were going to reject. Maybe he thought that it could somehow slip thru somehow? And then later after the second submittal it got rejected again - this time for not having the required 12 by 12 foot area of open space. He suggested that this was a new requirement and that is why he wasn't aware of it. I was frustrated as it cost time and money redrawing things. I would have preferred to know what my limitations were before hand so that I could have made design trade offs myself.
www.garagejournal.com
My GC says he expects to start on the walls this week so if I didn’t do it now it was never going to happen. I have always planned to put a small section of fence between my garage and the other garage or fence. I wanted to do that to make sure my dog could not get out of the back yard and I expected that the fence would also hide most of the ugliness between the two structures but this was also a really good suggestion which I’m glad I did.
My first thought was ****, one of my guys damaged the fence and the guy next door is certain to complain to me about it. I showed my wife and she noticed this was exactly at pee height. She’s right, I think someone must have been walking down the alley and felt the urge to go. I am going to assume it wasn’t one of the workers
You can also see here why I’m going to need to put up some sort of fence at the end of this space. If I don’t anybody from the alley would be able to just walk into my back yard.
