Building a Garage Addition to Your Home

Reasons Why you should Build a Garage Addition 

By: Mark J. Donovan 

One of the most rewarding home improvements I made to my home was to build a garage addition. For years I contemplated building a garage addition while I scraped the ice and snow from my cars and waited for them to warm up during the winter months. About 5 years ago I finally made the decision to build a garage onto my house. The first big decision I had to make after deciding to build the garage addition was to determine how large to make it.

I wanted a large enough garage to fit two cars comfortably and that would be of proper proportion with the rest of the house.  I also wanted space to include a work bench and to allow room for the lawnmowers or snow blowers. I decided on building a garage addition that was 26 foot wide, by 24 foot deep. Since my house was 36 feet in width, this gave me a garage addition that was about 2/5ths of the entire home frontage.

I also needed to make sure that the roof pitch and the elevation of the garage addition would be consistent with the rest of the home.

Because of the specific contour of my property, my garage addition plans also included a bonus room that would reside above the garage. Thus, I needed to include additional drawings of the bonus room, e.g. interior walls, doors, windows, closet, and entrance way and stairwell to/from the main house.

After excavation and installation of the garage addition foundation, the framing crew had the garage addition frame up in about a week. Three weeks later I had a completely enclosed garage, with all the outside doors and windows installed and the shingles installed on the roof.

From this point forward, I took over the electrical and insulation work, after filing for these specific permits.

Once the insulation was installed and approved, I called in the drywall contractor to install the drywall, and to tape and mud. I also had them apply a coat of primer and one coat of builders grade paint. It is well worth the money to have them do this.

I then finished the electric, installed the stair railing, interior doors and baseboard trim and the garage addition was nearly ready to move in.

The finishing touch was the installation of two garage door openers and a final application of paint in the bonus room.

My total cost associated with building a garage addition was about $30,000. I had been quoted as high as $50,000, however with a little negotiation and sweat equity I was able to get a lot of garage for a reasonable price.

A few years have gone by since I finishing the building of my garage addition and every winter when I see people standing by their cars in the driveways scraping, I am reminded of one of the best decisions I ever made.