Just a slideshow featuring photos of construction goofs. This one looks real enough and might show up on Google Street View if we knew where it was. A Google image search turns up an endless list of “Fail” URLs. Can anyone with better Google Fu come up with any more on this photo?
Dennis
If you’re referring to the second storey garage, it could very well be that there is a bridge to the road as yet unbuilt when the photo was snapped. I doubt it was a goof. I don’t get to say this very often, but “nobody is that stupid”.
The paint is flaking off the eaves of the garage, which suggests it’s not newly built. If a bridge was indeed planned, it looks like they either ran out of money or didn’t get the necessary building permit.
I’m going with fake … note the ad to the right “Tinnitus Solution Angers Doctors” … yeah right …
Just because it’s a garage door doesn’t mean it was designed for cars. I can’t imagine what an alternative use might be but don’t make tacit assumptions based only on past observation.
It could be some homeowners idea of humor.
That image isn’t just on that site. I plugged it into Google Images and got page after page of “fail blogs” featuring the photo (and nothing debunking it before I gave up on the search.)
I ran the photo through izitru. Unfortunately it wasn’t able to determine much about the photo, but for some reason it identified the location as “Catania Regency Apartments, San Mateo, CA”. (I don’t know how it determined this – there doesn’t seem to be any jpg metadata that indicates a location.) But AFAICT, there is no such apartment building in San Mateo, although there is a Catania Regency Apartments in nearby Belmont. But looking around the area in Street View, I don’t see anything resembling either the building or the railing in the foreground.
Here’s another view of it (but unfortunately no info about where it’s located). It makes it look like maybe there was the intention to build a bridge to the road. Whatever the reason, I don’t think it’s fake.
What’s so silly about a jetpack garage?
As to the apparent missing viaduct … we would need the building inspector to not notice it was missing … we would need the general contractor to not notice is was missing … and we would need the homeowner to not notice it was missing … seems highly unlikely compared to a decent photochopping …
Do we have a copy of the original image in it’s full gigapixel glory? … we could then zoom in and see just how well the edges blend in … or would we see obvious cropping lines?
The corner of the waste bin looks like the logo for the city of Los Angeles waste resources dept.
Nice catch, Troutman. Running that photo through a search doesn’t produce anything at all. But it shows it is not an apartment.
Dennis
Also … look at the distance between the bottom of the door and the bottom of the building’s overhang … that’s thick enough for a residential bedroom … but add four inches of concrete and a 3 ton pick-up … something is just not right here …
Wow, y’all have obviously never lived in SoCal.
The house is on a steep hillside and the garage was built to be at street level, something that is very common here. In other words, having the garage be “on top of the house” isn’t the least bit unusual.
What makes it noteworthy is that normally, there would be a driveway (yes a bridge type driveway) connecting the garage to a street, but for some unknown reason that driveway is missing. Either the street was moved or the house was sited before street plans were finalized, or whatever. But this sort of garage placement is very common for hillside houses here.
Looks like the East Bay hills in the SF Bay Area (though could be SoCal).
Here is what a house like that should look like.
My vote is with those that say there should be a driveway, but it hasn’t been built yet.
Maybe it is not a garage?
That is what I was thinking. Maybe it is just a bad exterior design and the “garage door” isn’t a door at all or maybe it is a loading or unloading dock that requires supplemental equipment. Barn hay lofts use those frequently. It may seem stupid to have large doors on the second story until you see people loading things on a mobile conveyor belt and loading a huge amount of stuff into them.
I don’t think the photo is fake. It probably just has a good explanation that is just a different design than most people are accustomed to.
My guess is that is is a garage that was supposed to connect to street level but, for whatever reason, never did. That makes the most sense to me, as the garage seems to be about street level. See Ornery Bob’s post. That’s what I assumed was going on.
Pretty sure it is. This kind of design is pretty common in hilly areas of CA. Here is another example from East San Francisco Bay:
Note that just like the house in the OP, that garage is on the second story, but as the terrain is so hilly it is almost level with the road above it. What is missing in that photo is the driveway from the road to the garage, which has not been built yet.