How much do people value a garage?

Strapped

mcduff16 wrote: »

Out of 2 identical houses, I`d favour the house with a garage

Then they wouldn't be identical

fannyanna

ukmike wrote: »

Strangely enough,that's not true any more,if you do a comparison quote between leaving a car in the driveway & putting it in a garage,it will be cheaper leaving it in the driveway.

Maybe because too many people end up damaging their cars parking in tiny garages

Beckyy

I would favour a house with a garage *that I could fit my car into* because it would keep my car in slightly better shape and save me from having to scrape my windscreen during the Winter, amongst other things.

I'd be curious for you to try and fit your car in (if it IS possible), just to see how much space you're left with. Of course, if you're not plannign on moving then whatever suits you is the best option.

WestonDave

In practice every house on the street apart from one or two that have had the garages rebuilt has the same problem, so in comparison terms we're not going to lose out. We'll also arguably still have the storage space but hopefully in a better format. At present with an up and over door at the front and an access door at the back you end up with a corridor effect with storage either side. If we block the front part off for things which need level access like bikes, lawn mower etc, and have the back as tools, DIY equipment plus "dirty" clothes and shoes e.g. for sport or gardening it should for us at least be a better use of the existing space.

The other reason for doing it is that at present the access to the back garden is via a door in the kitchen (this will be replaced by going through the garage). This currently means we have a 12foot square kitchen with double doors into the dining room at one end, a door into the hall in the corner near the double doors, and in the corner opposite that the door into the garden. All the doors break up the available space for worktops etc. so what should be a really nice sized kitchen suffers from lack of worktop and storage space! We had an architect friend round who said all the houses on our street were very well built but the internal layouts in terms of use of space were pretty poor - that's also partly what we want to address.

Anyway thanks all for the comments - as I said we have no plans to move, and if we did, a buyer who wanted a garage would simply have to demolish the internal wall to pretty much have it back to how it was - but without the leaky roof!

WestonDave

Beckyy - internal dimensions are (from memory from drawing up plans) 2.4m wide by 4.8 metres long. In 1950 when it was built and a Ford Anglia was 1.4m wide by 3.9m long, it was a decent sized garage. Now a current model Vauxhall Astra is 4.4m long and just over 2m wide! We used to have a house in the same area with a similar era garage, and could literally just get a mark 2 astra in the garage, if you parked it on one side (you had to kick any passengers out before putting it in the garage) you could literally just squeeze out of the drivers door - we had carpet on the walls to stop either the car or our clothes getting on the stonework!. The mk2 astra was 5cm narrower. It was also 20cm shorter and I can recall there wasn't a lot of space left behind for the one bike we had in those days - I had a paint mark on the wall to allow me to know exactly how far in to park so the door would shut. I think we used it about ten times in total.

The big problem is that as cars have rightly been redesigned to make them safer, that has come at the cost of making them bigger to fit the crumple zones etc in. So what was a usable garage then would be very small now. Newer houses tend to take this into account and have larger garages.

Bufger

For me its essential storage space but i can fit a car in it if i need to. At the moment it has an old sofa and 3 massive builders bags of parquet flooring i'm selling on but without that stuff its just usually an empty void in the middle surrounded by shelves of tools/stuff and a workbench (punchbag and some gym equip in the middle too).

I do sometimes need to use it when i bring a car home from work. They're usually 60k+ in value so i prefer to keep them in there than on the road.

Itismehonest

ukmike wrote: »

Strangely enough,that's not true any more,if you do a comparison quote between leaving a car in the driveway & putting it in a garage,it will be cheaper leaving it in the driveway.

Interesting. Maybe that depends on where you live, too, though?