Absorption of half the garage space.

16 years ago

We have a single garage which is an integral part of the house. But as we need more space internally we are considering absorbing the back 10 feet of the garage and adding it to a small room - this would give us a much more useable 18x10' room.

As a result of the above the garage will obviously be too small for a car as it would be 10v10. However it could still be used for the sort of storage that most folks use garages for (we dont actually use the garage as a garage - have three cars and couldnt park them all anyway. But we could retain the doors so the house wouuld look the same from the street - or we could add nice looking mews type doors. As a note, owing to setback regulations we cannot add another garage.

Any observations? I think this would be better than eliminating the garage altogether.

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Comments (3)

wantoretire_did
16 years ago
I think its a great idea, but check the code where you live; it may be illegal. In So. Calif where we used to live, many people made garages into rooms and left the garage doors intact so as not to tip off the illegal living area. Also, if you want to sell in the future, if it is illegal you may run into problems, marketing that area as an extra room. JMO
evaperconti
16 years ago
We did exactly this. Our one-car garage wasn't big enough to use for storage and to park a car, so we built a wall across the center of it and turned the front half into storage, the back half into a guest/TV room. We were able to keep the garage door intact simply by cutting the rails for the door down about a foot...the door still raises fine. We also had to change the style of pulley used, but it cost about $150 to make those changes to the garage door. The garage was already insulated, so we had to add a window, built a platform for the flooring since the garage had a slight slope, and run a pipe to extend the overflow spigot from the water heater out under the guest room floor. We kept the existing electrical, capped the garage door opener outlet on the ceiling and ran a couple extra outlets. We ran shelving around the three walls of the smaller storage space and we still have the same amount of linear feet of storage as we did in the bigger space!

If we had to remove the room, it would be a simple matter of removing the wall and floor platform, and it would again be a garage.

Our town doesn't care much what you do inside the house and considered the garage as living space already since it was insulated and heated/cooled, so our square footage didn't change and therefore the taxes wouldn't change. Garage conversions are fairly common here. We could install a door to the storage space from the interior if we wanted to, to make it more convenient to access that space rather than going through the garage door.
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flgargoyle
16 years ago
Here in FL it is a popular conversion, too. I've seen some with just a shallow (4') work place. Many leave the garage door intact to get around permits and zoning, but you do have to consider what would happen when you sell (or if some busy-body neighbor rats you out). If I were going to give up my garage (the day after my funeral) I'd probably just convert the whole thing, and get rid of the ugly garage door and put in some nice windows instead.