Building a new home: Garage questions

Speaking from experience, we built our house in '04/'05 with a 4 1/2 car garage attached, I suggest you build the biggest garage you can comfortably afford/get by with code setback issues. Believe it or not, even with 4 1/2 cars of space, I wish I would have shoved the wall back to give me 5 cars of room! And no, it's no Taj Mahal. Just 3100 sf 2 story. My garage is bigger sf than the house we moved out of though! Need space for toys.

 

Hmm.. Not enough info to answer your question.
What size lot? And shape of the lot? And road access points?
Is there an existing slope on the lot.

General advice is to go with the 3 car garage.
Also, make each bay as large as possible, that is, a little deeper, wider, and taller than your acceptable minimums.
If you do single car garage doors, put an extra foot or so between each door. This makes it great for opening the doors on your cars when they are inside the garage.

Also, you might want to use taller than normal garage doors or make sure the tracks they open on go up to your 12 foot ceiling on the inside. Remember, 12 foot ceilings don't do you any good if your garage door opens into a space 4 feet lower.

When I built my custom home 12 years ago, I did a large 3-car garage on the side. I thought that was way more than enough room.
Later, I added another 5-car detached garage at the end of my driveway.

Best thing we did when we built the custom home, is we took our "dream list" of things we wanted in each room to the architect/home designer. We wrote down every feature we wanted, for example: indoor barbeque grill for the kitchen, floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace for the two-story-tall family room, etc. This approach worked great.

The other thing I highly recommend is to show pictures to your builder of exactly how you want things to look. For example, our house is brick so we found a house about 20 miles away with the exact color and look to the brick we wanted. We took pictures and gave him the street address of the house. This worked great because the look of a brick house is more variable than I would thought. Things like the color of the mortar used and how deeply it is scraped in inbetween the bricks totally changes the end resulting look. This was well worth doing. Our end result of our brick look was very close to the sample house, but not exactly the same. Brick color patterns vary slightly based on where they are bought. Turned out very nice.

Good luck.

 

Don't settle for less than a 3-car garage. I'm looking a resale homes now, and have told the realtor that I'm not interested in anything less.

If you're really in a pinch for space, maybe have one or both sides as tandems. My brother's garage is a double-car width, but long enough to accommodate four cars -- looks brilliant and doesn't interfere with the architecture of his historic (1915) home.

 

Time for a well thought out creative approach. I built my garage/shop (that I run my exotic car business out of) as an addition to what had been a 700 s.f. 1 1/2 story cottage. New house 2300 s.f. 2 story with a 4-car garage 20 wide x 40 deep and a 400 s.f. machine shop off the side.

If you are planning on a single lift, I recommend going double deep as I did and put the lift in back. This way you don't have any issues with garage doors or tracks in the way (I have quite a nice living room in the space above the garage door). I also angled it a bit so it is easier to drive in or out without emptying the garage. This allowed me to locate it more toward the middle so it is easier to work on the side nearest the wall. I can't park cars side by side in the back because of my equipment but I didn't build it for storing cars.
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+2. You can never have a big enough garage. I Just built a three car with a ceiling tall enough to put in a couple of four post lifts in case I want to stack 'em.

Defiantly leave room for a lift up top. Also i would also say three car minimum. Both you and your wife are going to want to park inside of the new garage and then you are going to want room for a project/fun car.

Oh and this is a great site if you want to ask a bunch of garage-related questions:
http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/

 

with 1.4 acres, I would definitely go with the 3 car option (if not add a 4th). There is more than enough room for the house, and plenty of room for your kid and pup.

 

Keep in mind that wider > deeper. Personally I would prefer a 3 wide, 1 deep setup to a 2 wide, 2 deep, just for usablility reasons and not feeling crowded. Even when you have a lot of space, stacking cars behind each other can easily make things seem too dense.

But really just try to go as big as possible. . . especially when you can build what you want. I know a guy who recently built himself a very open 6+ car garage. Now he's thinking he should expand it or build another, not so that he can have more cars but just less crowded space.

 

I recommend to make your garage at least 3 stalls and make it 3 deep if possible and high enough for lifts and have a roof top deck for a patio. Just my two cents. Good luck to you.