Garage ideas

Personally I would go for the double stall instead of a lift, lifts are great but a hassle when you want to jump in and go play for the day or just an hour. My .02 cents

 

Another option would be to have one or two more garage entries on the side of the house, in addition to the two on the front.
You might have a drive-thru driveway with entries on both streets.

In my experience, stacking cars in a double length garage only works for seasonal cars, as it's inconvenient to have to move one car to get to another.
The same would apply for a parking lift, only more so. A parking lift is a workaround for an existing situation, not something you'd saddle yourself with on a new design.

My father was a custom home designer. One thing he taught me about homes was that you might stand in the road looking at the house two or three times in ten years.
But you have to live in it every day.

Go with convenience over "stying", every time. Design the interior spaces you want to live with, then style the outside around the interior floor plan.

A spare garage bay would be a handy place for a service lift -- you don't have to maneuver around the lift for "normal" parking.

And, speaking of "normal" parking: How many steps from the garage to the kitchen?
(One of my father's hints: How far do you want to carry five bags of groceries?)

Also: do you have a bath or powder room near the garage and/or main entry? (Especially if you have kids. Or might someday sell to a family that does.) A coat closet? A "mud room" for winter boots? (A walk-in coat closet can double as a mud room.)

Cathedral ceilings are "pretty", but you have to heat/cool that dead space. If you must do the tall ceilings, add a fan at the top (with a way to access for service), and make sure you can close off that tall space when you want to isolate it from the temperature of the rest of the house. (E.g. a separate entryway with a tall ceiling can stray from comfort level temperatures.)

For Montreal winters, you'll want the entryway to be a separated space. You don't want the living room temperature to plummet while you stand at the door paying the pizza guy.

Some of the most stylish designs are a pain to live with. Too many steps between the places you go most often.

It's the conveniences that make the difference between a "house" and a "home".

 

The garage door on the right could be extended all the way to the back of the house with an exit door and a curved driveway. A friend of mine has one like that in Canada. This way he can pull his jetboat in hooked up, unhook and pull forward to park tow vehicle. Never has to back up to park boat. Would work great for two vehicles.FWIW

 

Put it on the lift and that is where it stays. In fact block it in and it probably will stay as well. The drive through idea is a good one. I built a 30 x 65 garage with four 10' wide garage doors last fall. Guess that won't fit in your floorplan given that you probably need bedrooms, kitchen, and other non-car related rooms.

 

Can you have a separate garage, perhaps disguised as another house?

Maybe buy the lot next door?

I had a 2 deep by 4 wide garage - it worked well. I used one of the lanes for just one car and made the rest of the space the workshop. Very handy design.

Lifts are cool, and if you have the height build a loft so you can hang out and be level with the car on the lift. Makes a great place to chill, or do hobbies.

Good luck on your project.

 

How about an underground garage the size of the house floorplan with a ramp access if your building from the foundations up?.

 

Exactly what I was thinking.

If not that, just extend one garage farther back. It'll be a little more work, but probably easier than a lift. My dad did this to the house I grew up in when I turned 16. For him it was perfect timing so he could increase storage in the attack and additional room for new tools and saws.

 

the drive through two deep garages are nice, but remember you have the same problem as with a lift as you cannot drive through unless one car is moved, that being said you can install a lift in one and drive underneath the lift with the other car in the air, but make sure you get a wider lift... I had the same dilema with one of my homes, I ended up putting garages on both sides of the house with lifts, the architect made it work and turned out great, one garage is for DD etc. the other is a toy garage either way I get 8 cars under roof easily

 

Good suggestion. They usally give you more room to make the garage bigger.

 

What about something like this? The red represents the driveway outline (and the cars) and the blue represents a third garage door. Just the first thing that came to my head. As you can see I'm pretty awesome at photoshop.
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Only other feasible option I could think of:
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Well this by far would be the coolest lol

 

It's the garage I want for My dream home. (I already have visions of it but everytime I think about the cars I'd like to put in it, the garage has to get bigger! ).

 

For underground garages, you have to look at your water table and drainage options.

And then there's the ramp issue, for cars with a large overhang. A short ramp tends to have pretty severe grade changes at the bottom.
You could make a longer, gentler ramp outside, but then it'd fill with snow.

The nice part about an indoor ramp is that the entry looks like a normal one car garage. No hint of the collection one flight down.

Or you could have the exit of the Batcave involve jumping a gap after running through the waterfall.

Well, Montreal and Monaco do have slightly different climates.

While many architects do tend to keep doing variations on the same design, the great ones build to integrate with the surroundings, climate, seasonal natural light, etc.

A mediterranean design would stand out from the other houses on the block, though.

 

Looks like you are limited by lot and housing design, nothing ideal. My personal work around is that my car is in a 10X20 storage unit two miles from my house. When I want to use the car I drive my regular vehicle over there and swap them out. Not my preference but it's what I do. I usually use my car three of four days straight then swap them back. I like the drive through idea and also the seperate garage idea. On for dailies and one for F-car where you can tear it apart and drain fuel if needed without gassing the house and without people accidentally bumping into car or leaning on it.

 

By the way 20X20 for a garage is a cubicle without room to move around on open doors with comfort, not a great option for a car guy. Time to scrap it all and start over. Go victorian style with garage in the back and a seperate carriage house and scrap the corner lot and buy a bigger one. Or you could sell the F-car to finance the larger garage.

 

There are some issues still to work out, I admit. I was thinking that the snow on the ramp problem could be solved with a heated ramp all the way along it's length.

I quite like this idea!. The garage above ground could be used for visitors to the house!

Imagine explaining that to your insurance company if you got it wrong:

"Right, what hapened was, I was trying to jump this gap and....., as for the flood damage, I've got this waterfall I have to drive through and....., hello?.....,HELLO?!..."

 

That's why you add ...
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... a LEM docking target.

The more common answer is to hang a tennis ball from the ceiling. When it hits the windscreen, you're there.

 

FWIW I agree with the following quote,
[QUOTE By the way 20X20 for a garage is a cubicle without room to move around on open doors with comfort, not a great option for a car guy.

My three car garage is 27x23 and I have very little space. When I actually want to work on one of my cars I have to put something out on the street. I would also suggest making sure the ceiling is tall enough for you to have a lift that can have a Mini-van/SUV under it and a collector car on top. I didn't plan for a lift and regret this oversight.

 

I park perpeniduclarly -- sometimes two cars. It's very easy to make sure you don't hit -- even without the hanging tennis ball or parking strips on the floor.



This also shows that if you make your garage just a tad oversized, you can park three abreast in an area designed for two. If you have a single door, it means no moving one car to get to another. (You have to be thin and careful about door dings, though.)

Another option is a garage elevator that puts the F-car in the room above the garage. I know someone that has this in his house -- puts a car from his garage into his entertaining room.

 

Vlad - I would recommend the second garage be a separate room with its own door and be your 'display' area - this would eliminate the potential problem of the car getting rammed. I would utilize more of the original floor plan if possible as the second garage as indicated is very small - I'd say you need at least 20ft deep and 12ft wide to get both doors fully open at once.

Does the back of the house have a covered deck in the center? If so, you could run a brick 'patio' to the right edge of it and then a 'walkway' around the side of the house to the front; said walkway and patio could be used as the path to drive the car around the side or back to the garage door.

You could set up the double garage for the daily drivers and have a lift on one side to use as your work area when necessary. It looks like you would have the headroom with the illustrated height. Again, you will need a couple extra feet of width to make this practical as a lift occupies approx 11ft of width, and you would want another 11ft of width available in the other bay to easily open the doors on your daily driver. Can you manage this within your maximum allowable foundation footprint? If not I would recommend making the center of the house 2ft narrower as the main 'sejour' seems plenty big.

Which compass directions do the rear of the house and the garage-side of the house face? Is the corner of the garage at the street corner? Also, is there an actual home to the original plan that you would have access to? There is nothing like seeing something in full scale to get a full understanding of the scale and the possible alterations that could be done.

I'm currently living with a 12ft by 22ft garage, and have spent a lot of time pondering its expansion within the limitations of my property.

 

I faced similar problems as I designed my house with a 3 car garage and was only able to fit two doors. What I did instead was take the outer door and build a 40 foot bay so that I can park one car in front of the other. I ended up with 800 sq ft. garage. My wife gets the short bay and I get the double bay so that we're sure no one bumps into my baby. This may be a viable option for you. Also, try looking up Mario Ardonetto. He's a renowned architect for highline homes in Montreal... Good luck. I've included some pics to show you the resukt of my setup. I'm still finishing up the garage- it's been a work in progress for the last 3 years...
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