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Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago My folks bought their house new, it was a nice subdivision of all brick ranch style houses, different elevations but all ranch style and the one thing they all had in common NO GARAGES ! they all had two concrete strips that ran from the street across the parkway up to the side of the house and that's it no garages provided by builder. All of the lot sizes were big enough to accommodate garages and you did start to see a smattering of 2 car garages being built in back and side yards, if you had no garage the norm was one car on the side of the house the other on the street if you owned two, Dads beater got the street treatment.
When I bought My first house in AZ. it had a 2 car,car port,which was ok because being open it forced me to keep it clean and not accumulate the crap that you sometimes ge
t with a garage,
When I purchased My second and present house it had a 2 car garage !! hooray finally a garage. I wanted a 3 car garage but the lot size prohibited that so 2 car had to do.
Now finally to the point, I love having a garage but its not big enough !! of course the Olds gets garage privilege's along with the Grand Cherokee, the wifes Torrent sits in the drive behind the Olds (which requires a car shuffle when I want to drive the Olds, the camper sits behind the RV gate covered with tarps (not a fan of that)
When I pull the Olds out I have to squeeze in and out between the wall and the door which isn't getting any easier since I'm retired I'm turning in to a lard *** !! and great precaution is required when Exiting the Jeep not to open the doors on to the Olds
My garage is filled to the brim !! not with junk but with required tools and camping equipment and 30 years worth of teaching resources (my wife was a school teacher) that hopefully will begin getting thinned out,
I have seen photo's of some of you guys who have beautiful 3 car garages , some with lifts !! I'm so jealous !!
is there anyone else out there who suffers like me ? let me know so I know I'm not the only one who suffers !!!
I made it a point when we bought the house that the cars would go in the garage. I can't tell you how many people in the neighborhood park in the driveway because the garage is full of stuff that's not an automobile.
I have a 3 car garage. We have 4 vehicles so one sits in the driveway.
3 vehicles in the garage, along with a 455 engine, a 400E engine, the back seat from the Jeep, a 3x5 work bench, a roll around 2-tier tool box, a 33 gallon air compressor, plus several boxes of Cutlass parts.
No matter how big your garage is, at some point it's no longer big enough.
Looking to build a garage for 4x what I paid for my car. 2 car up top, single roll up below.
No doubt I'll fill it up. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a non filled garage.
There is a company selling luxury garages (or the "ultimate man cave") in North Texas. The facilities look like a storage facility, but it operates a little like a country club with a clubhouse.
I have a hard time justifying buying a $60,000+ garage for my car that will never be worth more than maybe $30,000, but I would LOVE to have one of these to have more space to work on it.
I have a four car garage. My wife's DD, her Trans Am, and my 4-4-2 live in it. The fourth bay is yard and play stuff; riding mower, blower(s), Crotch Rocket, Dirt Bike, engine hoist, 455 on a stand, dirt bike gear, 80-gallon compressor, etc. This does not include the whole-wall 22-inch deep industrial storage shelves unit against one wall. MY DD Sierra lives on the driveway. Like Kenneth says "No matter how big your garage is, at some point it's no longer big enough."
I like the idea of the Man Cave garages mentioned by NTXOlds. They are becoming all the rage in my county. I'm not well-to-do by any means, but live in a neighborhood with doctors, dentists, attorneys, and a fair percentage of Denver area pro athletes. LOTS of disposable income. There are three of these man cave locations already open and a fourth under construction, all within 10 miles of my place. My Better Half says I can't have one of these, though, because then she would never see me, LOL! I already spend most of my spare time in the garage or yard. If my garage were remote, well, ...
I need a four post storage lift. Then I can stack the T/A and 4-4-2
Last edited by BackInTheGame; February 9th, 2021 at 02:23 PM.
I decided to buy some property in the county when the city i lived in gave me grief for having my 69 cutlass in my side yard next to my 1 car garage. When i designed my house i put on a 3 1/2 car garage, 2 spots for the daily drivers and 1 spot for a hot rod. I have another door on the back where my tractor goes so i can pull it out and mow with out moving cars. I built a 40x64x14 shop for projects and storage, it truly is never enough.
I like my 2 car garage, it's about 750 +/- sqft. It gives me plenty of room to pull and engine, have a good size work bench, and room for tool boxes, shelving, compressor, etc. All my yard stuff is stored in an outdoor wooden shed.
The only way to solve my problem was to replace a 30x40 with a 2 level 40x60, or so I thought, at one point I still had six vehicles outside... I have since down sized quite a bit so that no vehicles are outside...
When I was a kid the local air waves were peppered with commercials from a local garage builder named Danleys I just checked they are still in buisness since 1959, their not advertising man caves just garages but I imagine there is a top of the line garage from them that meets the man cave criteria. There is a guy a few blocks away that has added to his 2 car garage (nice addition cant tell it wasn't part of the original structure) but he has a corner lot, Im sure I could not do it . I wish I could.
I want a 150ft/sq house and a 15Kft/sq garage....life's good if I ever achieve it. The small house is so the kids can't move back in and it can be cleaned in 5 mins, OK, 300 ft/sq for the additional maid's quarters AKA professional beer n Bourbon assistant.
Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago My folks bought their house new, it was a nice subdivision of all brick ranch style houses, different elevations but all ranch style and the one thing they all had in common NO GARAGES ! they all had two concrete strips that ran from the street across the parkway up to the side of the house and that's it no garages provided by builder.
What suburb were you from? It sounds like Park Ridge. There is never enough garage space.
Wow, gargemahal compared to me! 1.5 car garage with work bench, snap-on 50" upper and lower, 23 gal upright compressor and bunch of storage cabinets and shelfs. The Cutlass 1.5 in the front and 6" in the back. The Alero is in a carport with 2 car covers 1 out door. 1 large and 1 small sheds and deck box.
I have a attached two car garage with barely enough room to walk around when the cars are parked. I can’t understand why the builders don’t build garages suitable for us car guys. I told my wife I had a solution, it would be to convert the dining room (since we only use it maybe two or three times a year) into a garage. That didn’t go over to well, now I’m living in the garage.
I lucked out & fell into a nice property over 30yrs ago. It's in the city but it was originally part of a dairy farm, when they broke up the farm in the '70s mine ended up being a double lot. It has an old 1 1/2 car garage at the back corner & I made due with it for years, I rebuilt it, put a floor in it & wired it. By '04 I had enough & finally built a 24x24 garage in front of the old one. I wanted bigger of course but I didn't want the garage to stick out past the main part of the house. Best thing I did was put a bathroom in it!! It's well insulated & heated. It has a full walkable attic upstairs,I wanted the attic space since my house is over a 100 yrs old & has a crappy cellar!. My only regret is I didn't put a lift in!! The city wouldn't let me make it high enough. I wanted the roof pitch to match the house 8/12 & with the extra ceiling height needed for the lift they said it was out of code, WHAT BS!!! I had just got done fighting with them over my original garage. They told me it would have to come down because a 21x14 garage was too big for a "shed". I was able to keep it since it was "grandfathered" in. Other than no lift it's been a great man-cave. It's toasty in the winter, I have a rear single garage door in the rear so I can get to the back garage easier & in the summer when opened I get a great breeze through the garage. Plus having the other garage in back I can keep all the yard junk back there. The grainy screenshot of my property is from my neighbor playing with his drone, pretty cool!
Last edited by rob1960; February 10th, 2021 at 04:35 AM.
No matter how big a garage you build, give it a year and you will wish you built a bigger one.
My wife and I plan to live in our current house another 4-5 years, then downsize the house, with a serious increase in garage size. Our goal: 2 or 3 bedroom (maximum!!!) with a large family room. One bedroom for us, an office/hobby room, spare bedroom. Big enough to be comfortable, but not so big to be “inviting”.
Im guessing we will probably have to build what we want. I’m getting to the point in my life where I have zero desire or patience to rebuild another house, the chances of finding exactly what we want are slim. I’d like an attached garage just for the daily drivers, but a enormous garage out of sight.
My 2nd year out of college I rented a house w/ a 1-car garage. It was enough to allow me to work on my Cutlass when it needed some minor body work and paint (although I did a lot of priming in my dad's more spacious 2-car garage). From that point on, I knew wherever I lived I needed a garage to keep my freshly-painted baby out of foul weather and to protect it from tree crap falling down the cowl and rotting out the lower fenders......again (I just FIXED that crap!!). So 2nd house (1st purchase) had a 2-car garage, but it also had to hold my new wife's car (that's when I got my '69 Toronado) and my '76 T/A that I just bought. This forced me to keep my Cutlass in Dad's garage for a few years (wasn't driving it in the winter anyways). Dang! Too many cars already.
OK, new ex, new wife, next house. This one also had a 2-car detached garage, but also had a nice covered patio behind it large enough to park a car. By this time I had wrecked my T/A and needed a place to store it, so I installed a 1-car door in the back wall of that garage so that I could push my T/A back there and park it in the covered patio area............where it sat for 12- or so years before I sold it along with a bunch of parts I had acquired to rebuild it (fenders, hood, bumper, grille, sub-frame, core support......). That rear door also came in handy to push my boat though and park it behind the garage next to the T/A in the winter. Still, it wasn't large enough to hold my ever-growing collection of vehicles, which got up to 6 or 7 at one point. After down-sizing my collection to 4 cars, I felt that I could not live with any fewer cars: 1 classic (Cutlass), 1 fast ('98 T/A) and 2 year-round cars for wife and I. Then we got the new-house itch.
At this point, I was getting old enough that I was done scraping windows in the winter to go to work. So the new house HAD to have a way to store all 4 cars under roof. We initially planned on building a new house; options were a residential home w/ a 4-car garage, or a country home w/ a 2-car attached for the winter beaters an outbuilding for the toys on some acreage. Found 2 potential lots (1 of each) and began talking to builders. At some point, the wife decided that she wanted to live in a house with sidewalks for the kids. "What's wrong with dirt paths through the woods??" was my counter argument.........which I lost. So while we were still talking to a builder for the residential lot and a 4-car house, we continued to look at what was on the market. We looked at a lot of houses w/ a 4-car garages, one even had room for 5 cars under roof. However, none of those houses met our other criteria; a walk-out basement on water being one of the toughest to meet. I had begun to realize that our quest for a 4-car garage house on water w/ a walk-out was going to be at the upper end of our budget range so I began looking at 4-post lifts as a way to pack 4 cars into a 3-car garage. This allowed me to determine how high the ceiling in the garage needed to be to fit my Cutlass and T/A (they're within 1/2" of the same height, allowing me to park either on top or bottom), and how deep it needed to be to avoid the door from crashing into the bumper of the car on top.
Then one day, after looking at that house w/ a 5-car garage, we were driving though an adjacent neighborhood and spotted our new house. It was recently built (new) and had sat on the market over the winter (this was in early spring of '08 when the market was crashing), but only had a 3-car garage. While I was a bit skeptical that this would work, we called our realtor to get a showing, I came equipped w/ my tape measure and went to the garage to discover that it was high and deep enough for a lift! Since it had a walk-out on a pond and met all of our criteria at a price that severely under-cut a new build (the builder/seller was very "motivated") we negotiated a great sale price that left plenty of room to purchase a lift. I later find out that this was the 2nd largest house in the neighborhood (only the model home was larger). Also, this house was a villa that required us to purchase the "services" that included lawn mowing, landscape maintenance and snow plowing. We got such a great deal on the house that the extra cost of these services still fit well within our budget. Oh darn, I never have to mow the lawn again. I didn't have a place to park the mower anyway, the garage is all ate-up with cars.
Last edited by JohnnyBs68S; February 10th, 2021 at 04:56 AM.
I could use more space but love where I live and really don't have room to upsize. Sadly the commuter cars stay outside but we have auto starts lol. I may get a lift to allow my wife to park over the winter in the garage. I. Going on almost 10 years here and it's taken that long to get my garage set up. I pretty much treat it like a 2 bay shop.
This made the county zoning people wet their britches while it was being built. They just knew they had a Virginia International Raceway race shop going on the tax rolls! Then I disappointed them...
36x50, 16x50 loft, pole barn/truss construction on slab. 64 Starfire, 69 W-Toronado, 74 Hurst and 76 Ninety Eight live in it with all their stuff, plus normal home garage equipment and household overflow. Old Gray Ghost Custom Cruiser lives outside.
I have a attached two car garage with barely enough room to walk around when the cars are parked. I can’t understand why the builders don’t build garages suitable for us car guys.
When we were looking for a house I learned to bring a tape measure with me so I could measure the garage. You would be amazed how many newer houses have garages that are too short to park a 1971 Cutlass in (and be able to close the garage door). We saw a lot of nice houses but had to pass since the garage was too short to park the cars in them. I guess the builders thought everyone drives a Toyota Corolla.
Last edited by Fun71; February 10th, 2021 at 07:33 PM.
The only way to solve my problem was to replace a 30x40 with a 2 level 40x60, or so I thought, at one point I still had six vehicles outside... I have since down sized quite a bit so that no vehicles are outside...
I need to build one. I have a corner of my property. I was thinking, what would fit would be a 30x40, and then maybe a 20x20 making an L to the back right. Front end looking like this, but I see those three doors pretty much taking up 40 feet, not 30.
You guys are friggin killing me !!! But I asked for it !!! my Olds deserves better but unless I win the lotto and can move I'm staying here. I do have a 12x16 shed /shop in the planning stages, it's mostly for a wood shop but it will take a little of the garage overload (thats the biggest I can go with out a permit ) and between the cement slab required and the shed they are pricey.
When I went house hunting I specifically when looking for a property for our at the time 7 cars with atleast garage space for 2 cars. I lucked out and found a Commercial building with an upstairs residence. Place is 100 years old or so built of Concrete and steel. Needed(and still needs) tons of work. Full rewire and plumbing.. The place is massive. And the area I am in the property is cheap as are the taxes. The downstairs garage is 110 foot deep or so not including the coal bin at the back and 25 foot wide, but only after about the first 30 foot where our parlor is. The upstairs garage where the shop will be is 60X25 foot. The last pic is of me(6'4" tall) standing on the first shelf I built. I built 4, three that were 8 foot long and one that was 10 foot long. I fastened them all together for one long 34 foot long shelf.
Stick has my vote for coolest garage! How many hearses you have now?!
Thank you. I love this place. The bottom garage currently has 5 cars in it with room for another 2 if I straighten up more. With room for 1 additional one if I could get rid of a home made dumpster full of building debris. Currently between the 3 of us living here there are 6 hearses. Sadly only one of them is an Oldsmobile but I hope that will grow in the future.
I put some of these in my garage. Made a huge difference in storage space and got a lot of stuff off the floor. My garage has 9 foot ceilings so that helps too. They come in different sizes also.
There is a company selling luxury garages (or the "ultimate man cave") in North Texas. The facilities look like a storage facility, but it operates a little like a country club with a clubhouse.
I have a hard time justifying buying a $60,000+ garage for my car that will never be worth more than maybe $30,000, but I would LOVE to have one of these to have more space to work on it.
There's a similar operation near me. Cost is a fair bit more, but it filled up quickly. It's definitely a different level of disposable income than I'll ever enjoy. Friend of mine bought a unit in a local industrial park and used it as his mancave for a few years before building a nice crib on his property.
When we bought our house, we made sure there was room for me to build a shop. Took 10 years before we were in a position to do it, but I wound up with a 900 sq ft shop built mostly by sweat equity. Cost me a third of what it would have cost through a contractor.
February 9th, 2021, 12:07 PM
Like Kenneth says "No matter how big your garage is, at some point it's no longer big enough."
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