Garage Size (Austin, Round Rock, Brushy Creek: HOA, house, neighborhoods)

[10scoachrick]

Originally Posted by ScoPro

I don't have a problem with our 16' double door (Jeep Cherokee & a Pontiac G6 sedan), but the 18'6" width of the garage makes it a tight fit getting out of the cars when both are parked inside.

My brother designed his custom built home himself - I think his living space plan is very awkward, but his 1,000+ sq.ft. four car garage with two 16' doors is awesome. Lots of room for his 4 cars plus workshop space and parking his John Deere lawn tractor too. There was even plenty of room to build a regular stairway up to the huge storage area in his attic and a side entry door.

My kind of guy!!! Maybe in my next life.(No lawn tractor, please...maybe an old-man motorcycle instead)

[EzPeterson]

I think the door size is pretty standard, and has been for a while, it's the space left over afterwards. Parking our Armada and Corrolla in the garage requires one to be carefully backed in in order to leave enough space to open doors.

For the OP - most builders will extend/widen the space if you're building from the ground up, at additional expense of course!

[owlman]

In the olden days homes were smaller but were garages bigger? Where did people park their Fleetwood Broughams and Buick 225s and whatnot?

[G Grasshopper]

I only have one car, so no problem with the door size, but I do very much miss the larger interior of the garage of our last house (in CA- built in 1964). We had about 5-6 feet on either side of the door and extra length, too. We had cupboards on all three walls, our "garage refrigerator", washer/dryer, workbench at the back - lots of storage and work space. I'm working on cleaning out the post-moving boxes, installing more pegboard, and just about finished on a small shed in the back yard (and also put cupboards into the laundry room, which had none when we moved in,) so I am working on accommodating the "small garage syndrome," but surely would have preferred it the other way. We love our house (built in 1996), but it was surely short on storage area. Working on it.

[PittsburghAustin]

I moved down from PA also and the first thing I noticed in the current single family home i have, the condo I lived in or the apartment garage I rented was lack of length. I have a compact SUV and it hardy leaves any room in the front of it to get by the car. The townhouse I lived in had little passage room to get around the front of the car. The apartment garage I had to walk in back of the car with the door open to get to the entrance door. I think that is why you see so many pick ups and big SUV in the driveways.
In Pa I had three houses and one townhouse and could put shelving in the front of the garage and still walk in front of the car. It seems to be a TX thing or maybe an Austin Area thing.

[AustinGuy]

My friend owns a townhouse in very Central Austin. For some reason, about half of her neighbors in the complex have purchased huge pickup trucks that have no hope of fitting in their garages, so they all park parallel to the door behind their garages. It makes it sort of a mess to get in and out of there.

[pmiranda]

I guess the builders figure that since most people (not me) just use their garage as a storage locker that they shouldn't waste the extra money to build a garage that will hold a fullsize truck. Then they get the bonus that if you want to build a decent size garage they can charge an upgrade fee.

[mark311]

Originally Posted by pmiranda

I guess the builders figure that since most people (not me) just use their garage as a storage locker that they shouldn't waste the extra money to build a garage that will hold a fullsize truck.

Yes, and now I'm thinking that I need to take off a half day of work so I can go home and clean up that storage locker so my car can fit in there and avoid the "large hail" that is possibly projected this evening.

[BriansZ]

The Pennsylvania house that I grew up in (built in '73)had a two car garage. In that garage we had enough width to fit our riding mower, my mom's Volvo, my Conquest, and my dirt bike. Also on the side with the riding mower was a workbench.

Although I doubt I'll ever have the chance to go back and measure the dimensions of that garage, I think it was slightly wider and deeper. Cars have gotten larger also though, so we're probably dealing with a combination of shrinking garages and growing cars.

When we had our house built last year a three car wide garage was a 'must-have'. There was one house that we liked but we had to rule out because they only offered a three car tandem garage. We did have the option to extend our garage and drop it down so that we could have added an extra door panel and an extra three feet of depth. It was tempting, but I didn't do it. I recently bought a double cab short bed Tacoma and it fits in the tiny third car section just fine. My wife parks her smaller sedan in the two car section which leaves us plenty of room for bikes and other garage stuff. One of my projects this year is a deck and when I build that I'll have vertical boards for skirting and build a door so that I'll have some storage underneath. It will only be five foot high but I can at least get my mower out of the garage.

[EzPeterson]

Originally Posted by BriansZ

One of my projects this year is a deck and when I build that I'll have vertical boards for skirting and build a door so that I'll have some storage underneath. It will only be five foot high but I can at least get my mower out of the garage.

Exactly what I did. Make sure you put something like this Shop Tuftex 26-in x 10-ft White Panel at Lowes.com under the deck to keep rain water, etc. off your mower.

I took it a step further and anchored a storage rack for rakes, brooms, etc to the slab - clearing even more space in the garage.