I simply don’t get this. I live in Montana, where it gets cold, wet, rainy, and windy. My home was built about 30 years ago, and it has a detached garage. This is the 5th house I’ve owned, and the first time I’ve ever encountered such a thing.
Since moving in to this home, I’ve been looking around at other houses. I’m even seeing brand-new very expensive houses with detached garages. They’re common in the cheaper houses in town, even when it would have been easy to attach the garage to the house.
WHY would anybody do such a thing? Why would you WANT to walk out in the rain/snow/sleet/hail instead of having the garage attached to the house? What insane masochist designed this house?
One reason would be safety. If something catches fire in the garage it doesn’t spread to the house, another would be carbon monoxide. Other then that, I think the reason is that you can have a bigger house and a longer driveway. Instead of a two car garage attached to the side of the house, you only need to leave enough space for one car to get around the house. This would allow for the house to be, what, 15 feet wider.
I’m with you. For the last six years, I have lived in a house with an attached garage for the first time in my life. I just can’t envision ever going back. And I don’t even live anywhere that experiences extreme cold. But dammit, sometimes you’re already in your underwear when you remember leaving something important in the car, and it’s awfully nice to not have to get dressed again to retrieve it!
I thought about that, but (a) if my garage goes up in flames, they’ll probably leap the 20 feet to the house, and (b) carbon monoxide is only a problem if I leave the car running with the garage door open, and it takes a special kind of stupid to do that.
I don’t understand what you’re saying at all. Are you envisioning a scenario where the garage is in back of the house? Even still, how could removing it from the house let the house get bigger?
I have a house. I have a garage. Between them is a little walkway and some lawn. Move the garage toward the house until they touch. No more walkway to shovel. Less lawn to mow. One less door. One less wall. The driveway gets longer, which allows more parking/maneuvering space.
The only downside I see to attaching it is that I’d lose a laundry room window. Big deal.
I personally like detatched garages for aesthetic reasons. I think attached garages are ugly and detract from the look of the house. My current house has a detatched garage in the back, accessible from the alley, so there is nothing but the house and front lawn to see from the street; i.e., no cars, driveways, garages, trash cans, etc to crowd the view.
Of course, that means I have to walk through the rain at times to get to my car, but this never really bothers me much.
I think you’ll find that a significant percentage of fires, as well a burglaries start in attached garages. Garages are easy to break into and the doors between house and garage are often interior doors, easy to defeat and often left unlocked. Many attached garages have a door to the back yard, which may been left unlocked, or provides a secluded entry for breaking in. People often store flammables in a garage w/o giving it a second thought. One scenario that seems too common is gas fumes, from a can, combined w/ a gas water heater in the garage. The fumes are ignited by the WH pilot light and there goes the house. The convenience is great, but it requires some thought to protect your security.
It is mainly for architectural and aesthetic reasons. Attached garages can screw up the lines of the house and garage doors are notoriously low-rent looking. When the garage is detached, you can expand it, modify it, or knock it down without affecting the rest of the house. Not five minutes ago, I read about an author that turned his detached garage into a fine, dark wood, library and studio so some people just think along those lines.
At my last home, we had a garage built. After looking at the options, we had no choice but to build a detached garage because if we attached it to the house, it would have violated local laws. Specifically, we were not allowed to build within a certain distance of our property lines, and our house was too close to the lines on either side. Additionally, the detached garage is cheaper and, as mentioned above, safer in the event of a fire.
Using an interior door would be a violation of building code. You must have an exterior fire door connecting the house to the garage.
I’ll have to disagree with the first part of this sentence (if you’re putting the garage in back, nobody can see it whether it’s attached or detached, so it makes no difference) and strenuously disagree with the second part. All of the really high-priced huge houses where I lived in California and where I live now in Montana have built-in garages. They don’t look low-rent at all. Heck, a large battery of garage doors is a status symbol in a lot of areas. It means you have plenty of cars.
And you couldn’t convert an attached garage into a library and studio?
With one less wall, one less door, no connecting walkway, no buried electrical cabling, no separate breaker panel, it seems to me the attached garage would almost always be cheaper.
Again, if my garage burst into flame, I can pretty well guarantee it would jump the 15 or 20 feet to the house.
I don’t think the fire could make a 20 foot jump, but IANAFF. As for the CO, it might take a special kind of stupid, but it still happens.
So let’s say my lot is 50 feet wide. My house is 30 feet wide and my garage is 20 feet wide. Push the garage to the back and now the house can be 40 feet wide with a 10 foot driveway to get to the back of the house.
Some people like all those things
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing for or against attached or detached garages, just want to help you see both sides of the argument.
Don’t most attached garages have to have a fire-retardant wall between the house part and the garage part? I know that my parents’ house has one, but mine does not. I would suspect that new construction would require this.
Regarding extra rooms…several of my friends and neighbors have turned their attached garages into extensions of their homes - particularly, family rooms. One guy two doors down did that and then built himself a detached garage too.
With many designs for attached garages, you’re essentially blocking as much as 25% of your external wall space that otherwise could have been used for windowed, naturally lighted sunrooms or screened porches. These are enjoyable to inhabit and raise the value of the home. In my mind the livability considerations easily dwarf all other factors, but you also can’t discount the increased risk of fire or burglary from having an attached garage.
Also, some see the garage as just plain unattractive and bourgeois, and thus prefer to hide it behind the home and pretend that it’s a “carriage house” and perhaps put a guest bedroom above it, for complete privacy. I can’t say I disagree with the aesthetics of hiding the garage; I’d rather not see it at all.
Another reason may be based on the zoning code. Many zoning codes limit the square footage of building that may be done on a particular size lot. Depending on how the code is written, outbuildings like detached garages may be excluded from the building size limit, whild attached garages may not be.
So, if that is the case, the builder will be able to legally build a bigger house on a lot if the garage is detached.
Please elaborate on this so I might understand. I’ve personally never been in a house with anything more sturdy than a bedroom door separating a garage from a home’s interior, let alone what I might think of as a ‘fire door’. Is your typical front door on a home a fire door? Also, who checks on this? I have many relatives in Louisiana and Mississippi who’ve dealt with countless building inspectors and insurance appraisers in the last few years and have never heard of such a thing.
Honestly, as a paranoid bastard, I’ve always been taken aback by the low quality of the doors folks have leading into their houses from garages.
It is possible to have scads of money and a passel of autos and still look quite low-rent. In fact parts of California are well-known for this. There’s a whole class of people out there with far more money than taste.
This is New England. A multi-car garage screw with the lines of a “true” New England house. My house is 250 years old and an attached garage would be beyond tacky if we built one. We have talked about building a big, detached one in our former barn area however. There is a radio commercial going on here now in the Boston area about how unbelievably tacky normal garage doors and the associated garages are and a specialty company who can come and help you fix this terrible problem.
I have seen houses that do garages well but, if you get attuned to what the anti-garage architectural crowd is saying, it is easy to look at a house with a large garage and then trim it off in your head and notice the huge improvement. Again, this is New England and does not apply to all styles of homes (although it could for many) and people can be really judgmental about it.
Exactly. In fact, I associate lots of cars with a low-rent neighborhood. Have you ever been to a trailer park? They will knock you over with their staggering “wealth” sitting outside. I can easily see 1 car per driving adult but that would usually equal just 3 cars at a time for today’s nuclear family and there is no reason that all cars have to be inside the garage at all times. Most people use their garage for storing miscellaneous crap and it is quite common for no one to use it for cars at all and instead use it for long-term storage. My driveway will hold about 15 - 25 cars. Somehow I don’t think that people would be impressed with my wealth if I loaded it up with even a third of that.
Contemporary houses can be designed so that they host a multi-car garage well but it is generally considered a blight here and is often has the strong negative stereotype associated with some type of ranch home, and worst of all, a split level ranch.
I think my thought process has been tainted about this with too much recent exposure in the Boston media but I never thought attached garages were a good thing unless skillfully done.
