My garage door is 92” wide (7’ 8”). The distance between my left hand garage wall & the racking on my right hand wall is 102” (8’ 6”) - I would not recommend anything narrower unless you are particularly slim - i.e. you regularly buy 28” waist pants in the sales. . . . . . . . .
It would be great if I could define the dimensions of a new build, as I did for the garage pictured above. Right now, I’m stuck with looking at a garage that is already built, with some sort of accommodation attached. My wife wants something called “a house” with an external storage facility that would contain myself and all my nonsense.
CpsmoXL - You don’t mention what you are going to do in the garage.
If it is just to keep the vehicle out of the elements, I think you have the dimensions you need from previous posts.
If you are going to do basic work on the vehicle then maybe this diagram will help. There are areas where some space can be compressed or overlapped – all depends how comfortable you are walking / working around the car with large items in hand that can damage paint/sheet metal.
Paul set up an opportunity for me to brag on my 2303 square foot (~215 sq meters) shop. It is two rectangles laid side-by-side with the back walls in plane. The main bay is 48 feet wide and 36 feet deep with a 16 foot wide garage door (12 feet tall) centered on the 48 foot wall. It is 14 feet tall to accommodate a 2-post lift and a loft/mezzanine over the 8’x8’ bathroom and a 20’ x 8’ dirty room (the oft is to store large/awkward items to keeps them out from under foot).
The other “rectangle” is 24’ x x24’ with a 10 foot ceiling – a 10 foot wide garage door is centered the wall opposite the back wall. A rather busy power point sketch of it is attached if it is of any helpful .
I like the lighting above the workbench. Seems like the garage of every house I moved into had a single incandescent bulb in the center that lit up nothing.
The garage I described is personal in that I am installing a lift that accommodates both work and storage and is not meant for two cars side by side. You can clear span 20 to 24 feet easily with floor trusses as long as you aren’t concerned with their height. I-joists can probably be utilized too. A factor is whether you have living space above it or are just dealing with roof load. Standard roof trusses can easily span lengths longer than 24 feet. I’ve done buildings with roof trusses that spanned 36 feet. It is all about accommodation, space and cost.
The last out-sourced action takes place this Saturday at 10AM when the crew is re-scheduled complete the install of my 10K 2-post asymmetric lift (install was delayed when my house cleaner called the day of install to say she tested positive for COVID; the crew left when I informed them. My second negative test came back a week ago). The shower was installed in the bathroom this last week.
The remainder (build wooden & stainless steel benches, plumb air distro, install blast cabinet and other items in dirty room, and move in tool chests and stuff) falls to me. It’s gonna be a busy month until I get busy restoring my E-Type.
Robert – I didn’t post photos to make anyone jealous. I’ll admit it was a prideful effort. Very few people understand the “cost”. Thanks for the compliment.
Cosmo, I thing you have your priorities wrong…
The question should be:
What is the smallest House that will accommodate everything else, so I can have the biggest garage possible?
All the best.
I have added so many feet of Romex and lamps of many descriptions in several houses…
Kirbert
(Author of the Book, former owner of an '83 XJ-S H.E.)
35
I designed and built my house in 1987. About 1500 sq ft air-conditioned living space and a garage that held 3 cars when I had my XJ-S. It’d really hold 4 if you carefully parked them, but there’s only a single double-wide door so it’d involve some maneuvering.
I’ve “thought” of expnding the bog window in the living room to a garage door. Would the “pier and post” floor framing handle the weight?
Naaah. too bad this house is not “slab on grade” as many are…
Kirbert
(Author of the Book, former owner of an '83 XJ-S H.E.)
37
There was a guy I worked with at P&WA who was a car nut. His house, at first glance, looked like a large house. Upon closer inspection, though, you notice that at one end of the house was a 4-car garage, two singlewide doors but deep enough you pull in one car and then another car behind it. At the other end of the house was another four-car garage. In between these garages, the house wasn’t really all that big.
Once upon a time I went to a garage sale in Waterloo…the owner had passed… Lots of machine tools… I asked if they had any phase converters… Yup let’s go down the basement… in that basement in town ,probably illegal, was a full blown commercial machine shop… He made prototypes parts for John Deere and others… How they got it all down there was a mystery.
There is a house in my development ( in florida) with a standard attached 3 car garage. Toward the side / rear he has 2 additional two car garages. Passed by his house occasionally and he usually has two of his cars parked in his driveway. My first thought was, What, no room in the garages?