Maybe your home doesn’t have a garage, and you’re tired of sweeping thousands of tons of snow off your vehicle every winter. Maybe your home’s current garage is finally feeling its years, and you’d rather build anew than continue to own a burgeoning earwig colony.
Either way, you’re thinking about new garage construction – which means you should be thinking about a few other things as well.
Since we’re often asked to build new garages throughout Central Minnesota, we’re fairly well-versed in the questions homeowners have to ask themselves before they commit to such a big project. Here are our top four!
Do You Want an Attached or Detached Garage?
Consider this the grandmother of all new garage construction questions. Now, an attached garage’s key benefit is fairly obvious: It will keep your vehicle warm and unburied and spare you from having to traverse the Midwest’s frequently inhospitable elements when you’d like to leave your home. The attached garages are a no-brainer if you don’t own very much land. Knowing that your important stuff is close by at all times is comforting as well.
But don’t overlook the advantages of a detached garage! A detached garage will preserve the original architecture of your home. It won’t dominate a smaller home, and it’s far easier to build a detached garage than it is to incorporate a garage into a preexisting structure. But here’s an advantage of detached garages most people overlook: They prevent noxious car exhaust from entering your home. An attached garage can do this too, but it’s going to need a ventilation system and even that’s not always 100% effective.
How Would You Like to Attach a Garage to Your Home?
The trend nowadays is to attach a garage so it enters directly into the kitchen or utility room. This is an effective floorplan, but arguably not the very best from an aesthetic standpoint. If you’re attaching a garage to your home and have the space for it, you’ll probably be much happier in the long run if you take that opportunity to include a nice little mudroom. Your guests will find that impressive, and assembling small children to leave the house becomes easier with space dedicated to the task.
How Big Would You Like Your Garage?
A lot of folks follow a simple line of reasoning when they plan out their new garages: “Two cars, therefore two-car garage.” But let us tell you, having a bigger garage than what you’d need to store your two vehicles can be incredibly convenient. People (especially those who live in the country) have all kinds of toys – boats, personal watercraft, motorcycles, snowmobiles, and even ice fishing houses – which they’d rather keep protected year-round.
Furthermore, while you may not want a bigger garage, whoever ultimately buys your house very well might. A three or four-car garage may be the deciding factor for a homebuyer who has a lot of their own toys to store. Best of all, building a bigger garage than you think you’ll need will yield you an 81% average return on investment should you ever decide to sell!
Do You Want to Add Living Space Over Your New Garage?
So long as you’re adding an attached garage to your home, you might want to seize the opportunity to increase its living space as well. Adding to your home’s livable square footage is always appealing!
But take care – it’s not as simple as a regular addition. The combined wall heights of both an attached garage and the new room above it may require this addition to include a higher roof than the one your home already has, which will greatly disrupt its current architecture. A detached garage doesn’t present this problem. In fact, creating a detached garage with an upper story storage space, office or bedroom will probably cost less as well.
There are several other things to consider when you build a garage, including whether its door should be offset or face the street directly, how you can seamlessly integrate it into your home so the finished addition doesn’t look too bulky, and what kind of storage space you should build into it. As one of the most experienced garage builders in the state of Minnesota, Angell’s Construction is ready to help you make the best decisions for your unique property before you break ground. That’s why we welcome you to contact us today!