I have a nine foot single door and an eighteen foot double on my garage right now.

If I built again tomorrow I would put in three ten foot singles instead.

That is my own house, and I build houses for a living.

Somebody asks how many cars. You say two, or you say three.

That is the whole conversation.

Every other room in the house gets planned around how you are going to use it. Where the bed lands. Which way the couch faces. How the kitchen works when two people are in it at the same time.

The garage gets a car count and a rectangle on the plan. Then it holds two vehicles, the mower, the freezer, the bikes, the tools, the Christmas stuff, and a workbench that never quite fit.

It is the only room in the house you spec by counting cars.

Standard on a three bay garage is a single and a double. Two doors, three cars.

I would take three singles every time. Ten feet wide each, with real space between them.

Here is the difference, and it is not something you see on a plan. Nobody at my house folds a mirror in. You line up on a ten foot opening and you drive. My wife does not think about it. I do not think about it.

With a double you are threading two vehicles through one opening, and there is always one of you who gets the bad side.

If you do run a double, eighteen feet is the floor. Not sixteen.

Plenty of houses get built at twenty or twenty two feet deep. Twenty four to twenty six should be the floor.

My rule is simpler than that. Whatever you decide the minimum is, add four or five feet.

That is not so you can park a longer truck. It is so there is room in front of the vehicles. Storage. A bench. Somewhere to set things down. Room to walk around a car that is already parked without turning sideways to do it.

Four feet is the difference between a garage you park in and a garage you can use.

Seven foot doors are standard. Go to eight at a minimum.

The reason is not the vehicle in your driveway today. It is the roof rack, the truck, the boat with a bar across the top, the camper, the trailer. An eight foot door means you never have to think about it again.

Ceiling height is a separate question from door height. I have about ten or eleven feet now. My old place had fourteen foot ceilings with ten foot doors, and I could do anything in there.

This is the part almost nobody hears, and it is the reason a lot of people settle for a short door.

There are door rails that hug the ceiling instead of running back into the room. That gets the track up and out of the way and buys you door height you did not think you had.

You can also move the motor to the side of the door instead of hanging it from the ceiling on a rail and chain. Same result, the ceiling stays clear.

Neither one is exotic. You just have to ask before the doors get ordered.

Pull through. If your lot and your drive can take it, put doors on the back of the garage too. We built one for a customer that ran over forty feet deep so he could stack cars front to back. He did not do the back doors. I would have.

Where the trash lives. Put an access door to a covered, screened spot outside the garage for the bins. Now you are not getting rained on taking the trash out, the cans are not sitting in the garage making it smell, and you are not running a full overhead door every week to move a garbage can.

You do not know what you will be driving in ten years.

Trucks and SUVs got taller. Roof boxes are normal now. A seven foot door and a twenty two foot slab quietly decide what you are allowed to own, and they decide it before the concrete truck shows up.

That is what separates this from everything else I write about. The inside of the house you can change. Move a wall, redo a kitchen, finish a basement. The size of the garage is the one thing you pour once.

I am not putting a dollar figure on this one. It moves too much by market and by builder, and I am not going to make one up.

What I will tell you is the shape of it. A little more depth, a little more ceiling, taller doors, all decided before anything is final, is not an extreme cost.

Changing it afterward is. Sometimes it is not even possible. You are not adding four feet to a slab that is already poured and framed and roofed. That is a different building.

This one does not happen at a framing walk. It happens earlier, with whoever is drawing your plans, while the plan is still paper.

"How deep is the garage, and what does it cost to add four feet? I want eight foot doors at a minimum, and I would rather have three ten foot singles than a single and a double."

If they tell you the ceiling will not take a taller door:

"Then what are my options on the track and the opener so I can still get eight foot doors in here?"

And the one nobody ever asks:

"Where do the trash cans live?"

Sizing the box is the decision that has to happen now. What goes inside the walls of it, plywood sheathing so you can hang anything anywhere, a hot line to the garage faucet, a 240V circuit, all of that closes later at rough in. Those three are in the field guide, along with the rest of what closes before they close the walls.

New question this week. It decides what I write next.

If you know somebody whose plans are not final yet, forward this to them today. Garage dimensions get set in about five minutes on a drawing, usually without anybody thinking hard about it, and then they are set in concrete.

And if one person signs up off your link, I will send you the full cost breakdown of the first house I ever built. Every line I tracked, 2017 prices, which are going to hurt to look at. It is not for sale and it never has been.

That is it for this week.

Hit reply and tell me how deep your garage is. I answer these myself.

Jon | Built With This