The ultimate garage?

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I am no where near ready to start my garage yet, but I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I want. I was hoping to draw this up in the coming weeks and I would like to get as many ideas as I can. I have lived so long without a garage that once built,I want this one to work really good.

Here are a few ground rules, but generally I will listen to every suggestion:

I want it to be a 2 car garage
It will be attached to the house via a breezeway
I have unlimited room (acres) with very few building codes
Its on a 6% grade with the ground sloping away from the house
I do NOT do much mechanic work on my own vehicles
I DO work on snowmobiles a lot
I am an organization and clean freak
Plan to add on a snowmobile shed (4 place) sometime in the future

Some ideas of mine thus far:

½ bathroom bump out
oil change pit
turn table floor so my wife does not have to back up car
chain saw area for repair and maintenance

So my question is, if you could build the ultimate garage, what would it have? What have you seen in other people's garage and said "I want that?" Any ideas?????:dunno:
 
Travis,

I'll give you my $.02 on two items now...

"oil change pit" You don't work on your cars, and your snowmobiles can easily go up on a stand, right? Waste of $ and space, IMO.

"turn table floor so my wife does not have to back up car" Have you thought about how much space will really be needed for a rotating floor? Everything that could get in the way would always have to be out of the "circle"...and your wife would have to be able to "spin" it. I suggest you have a drive through bay for her to use...

Since you have space, why not go "3 car"? 1 drive through for your wife, one for your car, one for the snowmobiles/bathroom?

This should be an interesting thread...
 
I have unlimited room (acres) with very few building codes
[...]
turn table floor so my wife does not have to back up car

Those two seem to be in conflict. If you have unlimited room, then unless you also have unlimited money, I don't really see the point in a turntable. Those are pricey pricey pricey toys. I wouldn't be surprised if it was cheaper to just put a door in the back of the garage also, so your wife could just drive right on out the back and swing around the building. Of course, that would involve a lot more snowplowing in winter...

My ideal garage would be LONG. I drive a minivan, and I really would like to be able to open the hatch and load/unload without being forced to have the big garage door open. In part, that is a privacy issue, as I don't really feel like advertising to the whole street when I am packing our van for a trip. But mostly, it is a comfort issue, as during inclement weather it is a pain in the neck to unload groceries and the like.

My ideal garage drains well. Unlike our present garage where there is always a pool of water about 2' shy of the door in winter with ice-melt in it, thanks to sloppy concrete work by the builder.

My ideal garage is well lit, so I can check the oil and so on without squinting.
 
Well, if you plan on working on snowmobiles and chainsaws, I would install a couple of small exhuast fans to vent the fumes. Tall walls(10') allow for more clearence for taller items and/or storage. Seeing how you live in nice warm climate:rofl:, 2x8 walls w/spray insulation. Skyligths for natural light and windows. My biggest thing would be in floor heat, laying on cold concrete is not fun. O.K., that should do it for now.
 
...laying on cold concrete is not fun...
Do you lay on the floor of your garage often Al? :p Maybe you need to be nicer to the Missus so she'll let you come in the house at night. :rofl:

Travis, I'll echo the other guys' comments about the drive-through vs. the turntable. The turntable has a lot of "nifty keen" appeal, but it's not as practical or versatile as the drive-through.

Not sure how the price would compare, but would a hydraulic lift (the kind that lifts from both sides of the vehicle) be a better choice than a service pit? You'd still have access to the floor space that way if needed. With a pit, the floor space is lost.

...What have you seen in other people's garage and said "I want that?"...
I can think of lots of things...Corvettes, Mustangs, Ferraris, Maseratis, the list goes on and on. :D
 
A couple of things ...

  • A friend has a two car garage that he only does woodworking in. He insulated under the floor very well and installed low pressure, in-floor heating - it's fabulous - warm feet while you work!!
  • A "pit" is very usefull .... as long as the water table is lower than the bottom of the pit ... make sure that you have a fan running steady in the pit ... gas fumes sink, accumulate and explode ..
  • Ten foot (or higher) ceilings are nice ... wouldn't it be nice to turn, tilt, etc, 4x8 sheets of stock without damaging the ceiling?
  • An overhang of 6 or 8 feet at the rear (outside) over a concrete pad, so that you have a place to stack wood, steel, pipe, etc, stuff that should be out of the weather, but doesn't need to be inside.

Just a few thoughts...

cheers eh?
 
I have what many would consider the ideal garage. Three car wide, with a two car door. 40' long. Downside: it is the place where my wife wants to keep a more than forty year accumulation of 'stuff' which is stacked head high. We can barely walk inside much less put vehicles in there. (I did make room for my ATV ;) )
I would suggest, for you, a three car wide with two car door, high roof with stout beam from which you can mount an electric chain hoist. Some insulation, good electric service and a way to heat. Lock it, lose the extra key to keep your wife from storing 'stuff' in it. :rolleyes:
 
All sounds good to me!

With a well designed pit, you don't loose any floor space, you just make it so there is a removable floor over the pit, 2" thick slabs of oak work well!

If you do the pit, a sump is a must, and the fan, is a good idea, also some caged fluorescents lights along the edge of the pit, to up light the bottom of the car/truck.

I'd also put some of those electric heater strips in the concrete near the entrance and exit of the garage, if it is on a slope.

Bathroom is a good idea, with a large "Mud" sink, as we used to call it.

Some kind of area or room to hang your snow machine outerwear so dry off after use!

Take the time and make the effort to place the building so that the sun shines on it the right way, and make the eaves so they over hang enough to allow the sun into the windows in the winter, but not in the summer, this will with heating and cooling.

On the side of the building that does not get any sun, put some windows WAY HIGH up on the wall, near the ceiling, these should open with a chain or something, so in the summer you can open them to let the hot air out of the rooms, and in the winter you get free light from them.

How is that for a start? :D
Cheers!
 
Travis if you put in a drive through you will loose that ceiling and wall space of that part of the garage on both sides. That seems a bit of a waste of space to me. Why not build a 2 or 3 car garage and have a drive through car port attached to the house side so that the wife can unload groceries and such without sacrificing the garage space for that? Ok I found the perfect garage plans for you Travis, check it out.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4213198.html

Well you started it with the turn table idea :rofl:
 
My BIL's uncle has a nice collection of Harleys that he stores on hydrolic lifts so he can still get his truck in the garage and also easier to work on...maybe something to think about for your sleds? A bathroom would be nice, I've always wanted a urnial in mine. :rolleyes: I would spend some time looking at some of the "ultimate garage" books that are out there to get some really cool ideas.
 
Hi Travis,
As far as the pit goes, I know you said you are very clean and organized, have you considerer the fumes and the possibility of explosion when you turn on a light,fan,ect. If you install a lt. fixture in the pit you may want to use explosion proof fixtures and fittings. I was also curious about the height of garage. Will there be storage space for the things you dont want the weather to destroy? Maybe a loft? Upstairs bath? Good Luck, this should be interesting to see final design.
 
Do you lay on the floor of your garage often Al? :p Maybe you need to be nicer to the Missus so she'll let you come in the house at night. :rofl:

Well, I my former life I spent way to many hours crawling around on shop floors working on off-road equipment and tractor trailers.:( This really get to your bones when the conrete in not heated. The wife on the other hand has aloowed me a couch in the shop, but the dog has claimed it as his.:D
 
The main purpose for my garage is to store stuff. Sometimes, it is even used to store our car. :D

Car in garage -middle -small.JPG

Unless we had a bigger lot, I could not increase the size of our garage. So my ideal would be to have a lot the was about 2 metres wider and 2 metres deaper. The garage would be correspondingly wider and deaper. An extra metre in each direction would be used to provide more clearence around the car and the rest would be used by additional storage.

Travis, like Art said, why don't you have front and back doors rather than a turntable?
 
Thanks for the responses...

At present I have two big choices. The first is whether to build on the North or South sides of the house. The South side is more challenging as the garage is uphill and will either have to have a high elevation then the house,or be dug down to the level of the house. This will be somewhat expensive, and I have ground water issues to deal with. This will also mean walking into a breezeway that goes into the livingroom.

The north option is cheaper in that I can just fill in will gravel and build the garage level with the house. I have my own gravel pit so that is pretty cheap and easy to do. This will mean you walk into the kitchen though.

I will try and get pictures of my home later on this weekend, but with 2 feet of snow on the ground, its still kind of hard to see everything.

Now the other big issue I have is whether or not to include the snowmobiles in with the garage design? :dunno: On one hand it goes against my nature to mix two different things (snowmobiling and car storage), but yet I also don't want to end up with a sprawling homestead either. You know big house, breezeway, shop, garage, snowmobile shed...it just gets too...well...spread out. Maybe I should make a bay for my snowmobile stuff and be done with it. I do know that down the road I will end up with some sort of pit or drop table for my sled. Almost all the work on them is below knee level and stooping over all day get tiresome. The railroader in me has worked too much in pits to get used to a lift. Still that leaves me with the decision to build a separate snowmobile shed down the road, or make a bay for my sleds now?

In many ways I like the idea of a separate snowmobile shed. I was thinking a ½ round building, kind of like a railroad engine house...(notice a theme) so that each bay could house a sled. Since sleds are wider at the front then they are at the back they would stack in better. I would build a 5 bay one with a drop table on the middle bay for working on the track, etc. Still this goes back to the sprawling homestead issue. On the same hand, I don't want to make my garage so big that it becomes unbuildable budget wise. Maybe I could build a 2 car garage with a mini-bay on the end to house my sleds?:dunno:

Thoughts?
 
The first is whether to build on the North or South sides of the house. The South side is more challenging as the garage is uphill and will either have to have a high elevation then the house,or be dug down to the level of the house. This will be somewhat expensive, and I have ground water issues to deal with. This will also mean walking into a breezeway that goes into the livingroom.

The north option is cheaper in that I can just fill in will gravel and build the garage level with the house. I have my own gravel pit so that is pretty cheap and easy to do. This will mean you walk into the kitchen though.

I will try and get pictures of my home later on this weekend, but with 2 feet of snow on the ground, its still kind of hard to see everything.

Now the other big issue I have is whether or not to include the snowmobiles in with the garage design?

Pictures would be good. I dug through some old posts of yours and I found one where you had photos of your house, but I don't know which is North/South. Since your addition is all bedrooms, I'm guessing you're talking of hooking on to the original section of the house. Looks like that is where the driveway is.

I'd sooner walk into the Kitchen from the garage than the living room. Think how often you come in with arms full of groceries. It makes sense to locate a garage entrance close to the kitchen.

I would also have a mudroom, so you don't step right into the house with dirty footwear.

Just how many snowmobiles do you have? How are they housed now?

To avoid the sprawling house look, could you just make a double garage, but make it extra long, and have a garage door located on the side that opens into the back of the two bays? (so you'd have two bays facing front, and one bay in the back that stretches across the two bays and opens onto the side)

Regarding two versus one building... I would think that it would be cheaper to make one larger building rather than two smaller ones - foundation costs, pulling electrical panel costs, etc. But two smaller buildings does allow you to spread costs out further over some years.

Pit vs Lift ? I'd go lift. Considering your groundwater issues, is a pit even reasonable to consider?
 
Travis, you concerns about the separate areas for cars and snowmachines is well founded, why not build a 3 car garage, but put a wall in that divides the space so you have two car parking and one bay for snowmachines?

Cheers! :wave:
 
Pictures would be good. I dug through some old posts of yours and I found one where you had photos of your house, but I don't know which is North/South.

You are looking due east in this photo, so yes the breezeway would be attached to the log-sided wall in this picture. The window on that wall, closest to the camera would be replaced with a door. There would be the small breezeway and then the garage. So if the garage was in this picture, you would be looking at the back side of it from this angle. I'll get better pictures this weekend...
 
...
I also don't want to end up with a sprawling homestead either.
...
So what's wrong with a sprawling homestead? :huh: :D

If I had the property you have, would certainly have a sprawling homestead with special purpose buildings.

Come to think of it, at Pellow's Camp, where I do have lots of property, I have four buildings right :) now and will be building another one next year.
 
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