Ask the Builder: Is your garage too small to store your car and your stuff?

Tim Carter, Tribune Content Agency on Jan 28, 2025

Do you park your car or light truck in a garage? I do both here at my home. I didn’t build the house I live in, but I hope to build my final dream home with my dream garage in the next few years.

I grumble each time I back my Ford F250 Super Duty 4x4 into my bay. The architect who designed my home made the same mistakes that have been made by thousands of other architects over the past 100 years. Allow me to explain.

Eight months ago, I stopped by a new home construction site. The foundation of the house and garage had just been backfilled. The carpenters had yet to arrive. I could see the 16-foot-wide notch for the two-car garage that faced the street. The architect who drew the plans must have been related the the one that designed my flawed garage.

I decided to record a short 50-second video showing the flaw. Much to my surprise, this video has gone viral on YouTube. It’s been watched 165,000 times as I type this sentence. You can locate this video by typing “garage wall error Tim Carter” into the YouTube search engine.

The attached garage at this new house is only 20 feet wide and about 22 feet deep. My guess is you’ve never taken the time to measure the average outdoor parking lot space. Most are 9 feet wide and 20 feet deep. You know from experience that if a car is in the next space and centered, you’ll bang your door against the other car if you try to open it all the way.

A 16-foot garage door cheats each slot out of 1 foot. Each car in this situation gets only 8 feet of width. It’s a very tight squeeze to get in and out of a car or light truck when both are parked next to one another in a garage like this.

I was stunned by the thousands of comments my video received. Most say the garage is perfect and that I’m a whiner. They didn’t seem to pay much attention to the point I touched on about having garbage cans, recycling bins, bicycles, lawn mowers, plastic storage bins, etc. stacked along the walls.

I decided to survey the 20,000 homeowners like you that subscribe to my free newsletter. I asked the subscribers to watch the same video. The results of the survey were the exact opposite of those commenting on the video.

Seventy-eight percent of the respondents said they wish their existing garage was wider and deeper. They wanted to have more room to get in and out of their cars and light trucks.

About the same time I recorded the video, I had shared in my newsletter a house plan catalog that is nearly 100 years old. It was published by the Home Builders Catalog Company of Chicago in 1928. The last section of this catalog has many detached garage plans. Each one of them had the exact same design flaw.

The flaw, in my opinion, is the walls on either side of the garage door opening. These walls almost always measure 2 feet long from the notch for the door to the outer corner of the garage foundation. All of the old garage plans show the same flaw.

When my wife pulls into our garage, the passenger side of the car is only 34 inches away from the inside face of the exterior wall. Thirty-nine inches of space is required to open a door all the way. Anything wider than one foot stored along the wall makes it impossible to exit the car inside the garage. I have to let my wife out of the car in the rain and snow and have her walk into the garage when we both come home from church. It’s a pesky problem.

The current prices for off-site or on-site storage is higher than thin cirrus clouds. The current rate for a tiny 5x5-foot off-site unconditioned storage space near me is $50 per month. I can rent an on-site storage cube that’s 8x8 feet for $99 per month. Large sheds you can buy to put in your backyard can approach $10,000.

Building a larger garage that has ample space for your car, light truck, and lots of other possessions might only cost you $45 more per month on a mortgage payment. I share this with you in the event you’re planning to build a new home or build a dream detached garage.

There are many other design considerations you should think about when it comes to planning a spacious garage. If you’re an architect, or an architecture student, I recommend you read all of my past columns at AsktheBuilder.com about dream garages. Let’s stop cloning that same mistake I see in all those old and new garage plans!

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