If you’re a car owner, then you completely understand the need for a garage. However, a garage is more than just a place to park your cars. It can also function as a workshop, additional storage space, and in some cases, a garage can even function as extended living quarters.
But, like any home improvement project, building a garage costs a significant amount of time and money. It’s projects like these where errors cannot be easily rectified, especially if you’re working with limited resources. This means that it’s important to be able to get things done right the first time. And in order for you to be able to do this, you need to come up with a clear and achievable plan for your garage building project. This means that you will need to consider important factors during the planning process.
So, what factors are these?
Number and Size Of Vehicles
First and foremost, a garage functions as a storage space for your vehicles. It is a safe place for you to store your cars, away from the weather and criminal elements. The most basic factor that will influence your garage layout and type is the number and size of vehicles you plan to store in your garage. As you can imagine, the more cars you have, the bigger your garage needs to be. Apart from this, the size of your car will determine the layout of your garage as some vehicles, like SUVs, take up more headroom and floor space than compact vehicles.
Garage Type
There are two main types of garages:
Attached garages, as the name suggests, are garages that are connected to the main house. The main advantage of an attached garage is that you don’t have to expose yourself to the weather to get to and from your car.
Unattached garages, on the other hand, are garages that are built separate from the main house. While this means that you’re going to have to walk a bit to get to your cars, this allows for a more flexible design because you don’t have to consider how the garage is going to fit in with your main house. This is also the preferred solution to those who also plan to use their garage as a workshop.
Usage
Your intended usage will greatly influence the design of your garage. If you intend to use your garage as a workshop, you might need space not just for your vehicles, but also for your machines, tools, and even equipment such as car lifts, which would mean that you need a much higher ceiling than usual.
If you intend to use your garage as extra storage space, you might want to consider opting for a few extra shelves and cabinets, or even an extra divider in your garage.
Even using your garage as just a place to park your vehicles entails that you adopt a few design cues like wider spaces, bigger garage doors, etc.
Zoning Laws
Zoning laws are what help to determine the limits of how far you can build your property. They are essentially what ensure that people do not build structures too close to each other’s property. These laws are important as they not only serve to help set reasonable bounds on territory, but they also serve a safety purpose, where properties are spaced far enough from one another to ensure that burning houses do not set other houses on fire, or that commercial buildings do not collapse on residential areas.
Ventilation and Air Flow
One of the most important factors to consider when building a garage is ventilation and airflow. This is what’s going to ensure that you do not trap the car fumes within the garage. A garage with poor ventilation will cause dangerous car fumes to accumulate inside. This danger is further exacerbated in attached garages where the fumes could seep into the main house.
Maintenance
Like most major purchases and projects, it’s important to be able to determine whether or not you’re going to be able to maintain your garage. This means that you have to select your materials carefully, and to ensure that your garage is built in such a way that repairs can be easily done, should you ever need to do them. A good example is even though this garage door repair Orange County service is readily available, you need to consider the accumulating costs if you have a garage door that isn’t of good quality.
A garage is a permanent structure that costs a lot of money to build. With this in mind, it’s important to get its construction right the first time. The only way to do this is to plan properly.
