NEW HOUSE TEASER GARAGE

While 2nd Man had most (but not all, ha) of the choices in the kitchen, I wanted to do a few extra things in the garage part of the house.

Here is our actual architectural drawing.  *Side, note, we'll show various rooms in posts but crop other things out to keep it all a surprise from post to post, ha.  There has to be some mystery as we go along!

We opted for an attached two car garage. Some people build without a garage or have another building on their property for their vehicles.  The builder said it's about 50/50 (with rural properties) as to who does a garage and who doesn't.  We decided we wanted to have the garage attached.  It'll be nice to not have to run across the yard in monsoon rains, it'll keep them close by and safe from hail, etc.  It's a little bigger than a normal 20x20 garage, this one will be about 22x24.  Just nicer to have a bit of space thinking about future cars.  We even measured our current cars to see how well they will fit and they will be perfect, with plenty of room between all four sides.

It will be a "front load" as they call it.  The way our property is shaped, we'd have to reposition the house to make it work and we rather like the idea of the driveway going right toward the garage.  Also, one large garage door instead of two (painted in the white trim color).  That's better, especially being in the country, to have the ability to open one big door and have all that space.  I can back a car out and use it for working on the mower, etc.  This drawing doesn't show lighting (that's on the electrical plan) but of course there are exterior lights on both sides of the garage door.  We'll save that for a posting on the light fixtures we chose.

While the house itself will have a regular attic space with decking and attic access in the hallway inside, with me being the king of holiday decorating (and finding all those bargains after the holidays, ha), I wanted there to be attic access above the garage as well, so I can have more storage space.  Since it was a big empty spot in the attic, we added a second 'attic package' for the garage.  It will be completely decked.  There will be pull-down stairs and lighting.  While this isn't exactly how it will look, we're going for something similar.  Just empty space for storage bins.  I will have almost 500 square feet of storage space!

Let the holiday decorating begin!

I also felt like there should be some natural light in the garage but we've never been a big fan of just having large regular windows in the garage.  A) no one wants to see your garage stuff from outside B) than can be easy to knock over a ladder and break one out and C) it's a security issue (someone can see if you are gone, see what kind of cars you have, tools, machines, etc). 

SO...we are doing this, an upper transom window.  Actually, two of them:

A couple of 2x4 transom windows to let in some light but still be secure.  We are also having them higher up (7 1/2 feet), thinking of the future in case we wanted to put shelves or something along that wall, they can go below the transom windows.  Oh, and they do not open.

We added extra electrical outlets around (two on each wall) you can never have too many places to plug in something.  Vacuum, tools, etc.  We are also future proofing things by having a spot for future electric car charging (it requires special outlets for that).

And this is the plan for the back wall:

It might not look exactly like this, maybe one less cabinet (for another reason at the end of this post) but it'll be similar.  As you can see in the architectural drawing, our water heater will be in the garage just like this and we'll have the back door, both in about the same spot...so that leaves this wall space to do something like this. It would be my dream, ha. We'll work on this after the house is finished and we are moved in and yes, we are going to have a garage refrigerator.  More on that another time in a post about appliances.

You can see on the plan, there is a back door going outside and I really want a Dutch door there.  I have visions of the future when we might have animals that we are trying to keep inside or out and a door like that would be nice to have.  Really, just to be able to open it for a bit of a breeze without having the door all the way open.  But alas, the builder didn't have that optoin and to change it out during the build (even though it's just a door) is much more expensive.  It's something we can just replace later on.

We also opted for a side-mount (or jackscrew/jackshaft) door opener.  We know some of you may be going "a what?"  It looks like this:

It eliminates the need for an overhead mechanism, it's vastly more secure and has some cool features such as battery backup (so it still functions in a power outage) and features a smart phone app connection.

The best part is that it frees up that space overhead and just makes for a clean, unobstructed look.

Our garage will be fully drywalled and painted.  We'll also do something special with the flooring, but that will be saved for a future post as it will be in several areas.

OH, and one last thing...

We made this decision a few days ago at one of our final design appointments; we decided to add a utility sink to the garage, next to the back door!  We figured it would be invaluable for washing just about anything, hands after gardening, fresh fruits and veggies, large pots and pans, rinsing mops, filling buckets, even washing animals, ha.  Who knows!!!

Next time, the back porch!