Attached garages require a complete uninterrupted firewall, and many places simply do not allow garages to be attached by even a breeze way any longer.I don’t know what the laws are exactly any longer, but I do know that a lot of restrictions have been placed on garages being attached to a house. In the 50’s and 60’s you could attach a roofed breezeway, or have the garage share a wall with the house, and you didn’t need the firewall. They also left the attic open to the garage. You could climb a ladder in the garage and walk into the attic.
In some areas, it may be a result of zoning for esthetic reasons and trying for more pedestrian friendly streets, as others have alluded to above. Case in point: Portland OR codes prohibitingsnout houses. Portland does not appear to require detached garages, but may encourage them by prohibiting garages from dominating the front of the house.
Well, I wasn’t thinking quite that low on the socioeconomic ladder when I made that comment. I was thinking more of the McMansions that boast a 3-car garage in front, occupied by 3 luxury-brand SUV’s. Wealth without class.
I’ll have to see if I can find the code, but the door between my garage and my house is a steel fire resistant door. In fact when my house was inspected before we bought it, the inspector mentioned that we should put a spring hinge on it, as it won’t do any good if you leave it open. Also, the common wall is the only garage wall that’s drywalled. I suspect it’s only for insulation, but it may well be for fire resistance as well.
(a) Attached garages. 1. The walls and ceiling between an
attached garage and any portion of the dwelling, including attic or
soffit areas, shall be 3/4−hour fire−resistive construction or shall
be constructed as specified in any of the following:
AND
b) Doors. Any door installed in the dwelling unit separation
shall have the door and frame assembly labeled by an independent
testing agency as having a minimum fire−resistive rating of 20
minutes. The test to determine the 20−minute rating is not required
to include the hose stream portion of the test.
I think it’s simply tradition, an archaic holdover from the horse-n-buggy days. The carriage house was always separate; it was to house animals and their poop, after all. The garage “evolved” from that, so attaching it to the main house wouldn’t have occurred to the architect as the very *first *idea. Over time, it thus became associated with quaintness and antiquity. Anyway, that’s always been my assumption.
Um, because of the slope of my 40x100 foot lot the garage floor is 20 feet lower than the main floor of my house?
That’s fine, but the popularity of attached garages dates back to the late 40’s and there were a lot of them built before code caught up to the problem.
Right. Depending on the local zoning codes, the detached garage may also be cheaper as it doesn’t have to be “up to code” for a dwelling, and *may *not require a building permit at all. YMMV.
And although I have no doubt Joey P’s cite is correct, that is for one State and likely only for construction after the date of that Code. Generaly, most Code is “grandfathered in”.
I know in the house I grew up in the door between the house and garage was a simple cheap wooden door, and the back door into the garage was super easy to break into, thus many home break-ins around there came in through the garage.
See post #10.
Where you live. And what about older homes built before the legislation?
My parents’ house (4 years old), built in southern Ontario, has a garage without a firewall. You can climb into the garage attic, crawl your way around, and tap on the back of the drywall leading into what used to be my brother’s bedroom.
Also, in Alberta, houses I’ve framed appear to have no firewalls between the house and its attached garage, as the walls we built were no different from any others. However, I haven’t been around to confirm this as I’m usually off the site after the frame is up.
Here is a Google maps satellite image of a housing development I know where exactly this happens. You can see the driveways going from the street, past the house, and to a detatched garage in back. If the garage were placed beside the houses, they’d have to be shorter to fit on the lots.
This makes a lot of sense. I was thinking specifically of my own home, where there’s a huge back deck and a front porch and the garage would attach at the back of the house. The only affected window would be in the laundry room.
I can definitely discount those. The increased risk of fire comes from storing flammable materials incorrectly and the increased risk of burglary comes from leaving doors unlocked. Don’t do that. Store things right and lock your doors and the detached garage makes no difference.
I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand how it applies in my case. The garage is a separate building in front of the house. Why would anyone do this?
Building codes vary from state to state and even town to town. Here, the door between an attached garage and the main house must be a steel fire door. The one in my old house is stamped steel over hard foam insulation.
But I still don’t understand why the garage behind the house couldn’t be attached–at least with a breezeway.
Thank you. I’m not trying to be argumentative. I just don’t get it.
I can definitely understand that. My home is on three acres of land outside the city limits. There are no zoning constraints on size or number of buildings. That’s why I’m baffled by the detached garage.
See above. That would be illegal here in Montana, as well as where I used to live in California and Colorado.
New England is definitely a different world, and I can understand the reluctance to attach a garage to a 250-year-old house. I’m speaking of houses built since automobile ownership became common. In this area, the majority of the homes built in the last 40 years are ranch-style homes, or your basic in-town home (I don’t know if there’s even a name for the style).
Sorry. Missed this one when typing my previous post. I’m speaking of someone building a new home and constructing the garage as a separate structure. I understand that there are different constraints when adding a garage to an old home.
From what I’ve read so far, I believe the reasons people build new homes with detached garages are:
(a) Some people want windows on all four sides of the house, and an attached garage would not allow that.
(b) Some people are constrained by lot shape, zoning codes, or land slope.
(c) Some people are emulating an old style (e.g., Victorian) which doesn’t look right with an attached garage.
(d) Some people are afraid that they’ll leave the door unlocked between the house and garage, thus making their home easier to burgle.
(e) Some people don’t store flammable materials properly and they’re afraid that they’ll set the garage on fire and take the house down with it.
Overall, the first three make sense to me – the last two don’t.
Accidents happen. If I store gasoline or propane tanks, or MEK, or spray paint or whatever correctly and an accident happens, (bottom rusts out, something falls on it and the container is broken etc), I’d rather have it happen in a detached garage, even with a firewall.
Are you picturing the door to the garage being 90 degrees different from the street? That would make for a tight turn. Wait, my parents house is like that now that I think about it. No, it’s not attached, but there’s no reason they couldn’t be built together or a breezeway be installed. It is a tight turn, but certainly do able. I’m not sure. At that point it might just be the added cost and the safety issue. Also, things go in and out of style over time, it may have been out of style at the time the house was built.
That’s what we do here, thank you, please come again.
Oooh, another thing. If the house and garage are attached it might up the appraisal value (and thus the taxes) of the house.
I love it when someone comes in with a “question” and then argues with the answers they get for that question. In short, the OP is ranting about having a detached garage; several reasonable answers have been offered for why some garages are still built detached (although I’d wager that the incidence of detached garages built in the last 10 years is fairly low).
Old garages were detached because they were horse and or carriage barns. You certainly didn’t want THAT attached to your home. Later, after the car became popular, the style tended to be the same. For one thing, cars were noisy, smelly things that you really didn’t want next to your house. For another, in cities, detached garages were often easier to access from alleyways. On small lots, this made for larger house footprints (that is, you could use the whole house for living space, and then have the garage near the alley).
As time has progressed, the tendency has been to attach the garage to the house. Mind you, there are some significant fire concerns about this, which is why uniform building codes emphasize things like firewalls between the two. So it can be cheaper to leave the garage detached, although that means you end up being significantly away from the house for the same fire concerns. Comfort trumps cost most of the time.
As builders continue to lobby for uniformity in building codes, there will be fewer inconsistencies from one municipality to another. With few exceptions, new construction is likely to be governed by the IRC, although some municipalities may still be building according to older editions of BOCA, CABO, SBCCI, ICBO or other.
It’s safe to say that wall(s) common to the dwelling must be covered with not less than 1/2" gypsum drywall, and if there is no ceiling in the garage, the gypsum drywall must extend to the underside of the roof deck. If a habitable room is located above the garage, the ceiling must also be covered with not less than 1/2" gypsum drywall. Any door between the dwelling and the garage may be constructed of either solid wood not less than 1 3/8" thick, solid or honeycomb core steel clad not less than 1 3/8", or other if it carries a 20 minute fire resistive label. Garages may not directly open into sleeping rooms. HVAC ducts which pass through the garage space shall not be constructed of not less than 26 gauge steel or other approved material, and may have no openings within the garage space.
My house has just enough room next to it for a driveway, leading to a two-car garage in the back. If the garage were next to the house, it would only be a one-car, and the house would also have to be narrower, and with no (or fewer) windows on that side.
Almost all the homes in my neighborhood are designed this way, with a driveway separating each house from the next. Given the same size lots, if each house had an attached garage, you would see solid house after house, without a break, and the houses would be smaller. The neighborhood would look quite different.
Attached garages can be in back, too. Even a garage that was originally built separately can be connected by a breezeway.