onehundredoctane

Newly married, my wife and I have been house hunting for the past few months. Not satisfied with what I've been seeing in the housing market in our area, most houses seem to have either a great garage and very small house, or large house and very small garage.

Being the type of person to have multiple projects going on (not just my S13 and S14) at once a small garage won't suffice. As opposed to having a typical 2-3 car garage, I want something different.

I spoke with a friend who has a 1,500 sq. ft. prefabbed metal building with 20+ ft ceilings to clear his lifts. With concrete, the pre-fabbed metal building he assembled and wired himself, he still managed to spend over $25,000. That's a chunk of change for just having a HUGE open space. There are tons of un-used space overhead.

Determined to maximize my dollar per sq ft, I've decided to start planning out my garage so that when my wife and I finally acquire some property I will already have the planning out of the way and all that will need to be done is to start putting together the garage.

I've seen some cool things done with shipping containers, yes the 40 ft shipping containers you see on freight ships, they can withstand a 65,000+ lbs of weight!


While cruising the internet in search of ideas for creating a garage out of shipping containers, it's almost like a Goldilocks and the three bears story. Too small. . .


Too damn big and impractical (for the kind of land we're looking at). . .


This one peaked my interest, but block work, etc, ehhhh, idk.


Then I saw this and remembered back to Tron Legacy, simple 2 story, open floor plan, garage apartment.


But the Tron garage apartment is based off of a 20ft x 40ft container design. I'm more interested in a 40x40 personally. Stumbled upon this pic of a 40x40 house. . . getting closer!


Since we are still in search of a house at this point I obviously haven't started on building this thing, BUT I have started to lay out floor plans with ideas and pricing out containers, etc. The more planning I do now, the less will have to be done when we finally find a house! Now at this point the cost of the containers alone is close to $18,000. Keep in mind however that would equal 3,200 sq ft!!!

Not one to sit idle I wanted to mess around with some ideas, windows upstairs maybe?


Screwing around with floor plan ideas. On the ground level cutting the inner walls out of the containers will mean losing structural integrity. Fixing that while keeping an open floor plan will mean adding beams, no biggie.


Notice at the back a lift going up to the second floor. I mentioned these containers were strong, so why not make use of the upstairs to store cars? I've already found a lift that goes up higher than most four post lifts, this would be perfect!


I'll wrap this up as this has turned into a run on post. . . keep in mind this is all just an idea at the moment, but that's how every project starts!

brndck

Best thread I've seen in a LONG time.
For about a year I've been researching tiny homes, like the Texas tumbleweed ones, but I still want a 5car garage to go with it.

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Benedict

I definitely want to see this develop. I've been looking at property in my area as well to get a feel for prices. I've been enjoying seeing the tiny house movement online and the different ideas people have but when the time comes for me to buy cost and practicality will win of course.

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Matej

A fellow that worked with my dad converted an old airplane hangar into a home. It was quite neat.

fyneyoungstunna

I two am in on the tiny home, and earthship crowd.
I have been following "container" homes for about two years now. There are even "container" apartment complexes.
I am currently obsessed with hobbit holes.
There are a couple plots of 38+ acreage lots here. One even backs a national forest. Its on my mind bad to buy.

Anyways.

The last pic you posted looks like a good setup, if you were to reverse the order. Put the garage on the bottom and the living on top. That way you could even have a pit area.

I planned to have two containers buried. One for a stockhouse/storage for two cars and spare parts with a concealed driveway out of it. The other as sort of a bunker/mancave.
then a garage on top of the storage one with steps leading down.

There are lots of configurations to play with and lots of directions to take this in. Good luck and keep us updated.

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dnice78

Such a cool idea, subscribed for updates!

AFSil80

Glad to see that there's other people on here that have looked into earthships and tiny homes, haha.

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onehundredoctane

So cool to see that there are other people interested in a similar idea!

Are you saying to have a "basement" out of storage containers and let that be the garage area? I'm a bit confused.


I'm interested to see any pics you might have of this!



Did a quick drawing of the upstairs, the front half of the upstairs will be a entertainment area/ man cave (God I hate that phrase). With the rear half being used for car storage. I'm thinking that using wheel dollies will optimize car storage, but without knowing what the flooring situation upstairs will be I can't weight in on that topic right now. Expanding on the topic of the upstairs storage area, this will serve as a long term area for restoration of my father in laws 1967 Mercury Cougar with a 390 cu. in. V8 and 4 speed manual trans. It was a wedding present from my FIL and this car means the world to my wife as her fathers business isn't doing well in this economy and it was the only wedding gift he was able to give us. The car has been in the family since it was purchased new, with the original owner being my wife's uncle. Sorry for the massive back story, but just an overview of what that area will be primarily used for. This way the car will be out of the way of the main work area downstairs.

Anyway, that story went on much longer than I thought it would. Here is the rough drawing.

BoostSlideWayz

I've been looking into doing something like this for awhile now. But i personally have no construction experience nor the property to even attempt this. Seems neat, just harder to obtain than i initially thought in my position ha.

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Super_OK_S13

Not sure if you've heard or saw this around the net.

The Garage Journal Board - Powered by vBulletin

I bet you can find a shit ton of info on there. My wife and i closed on our property in oct last year.

Heres a pic of the garage.



and the block building that needs the walls torn down and rebuilt. When done the bottom floor will be our storage area and the 2nd floor is going to be an rc drift hobby shop/track.



good luck with the build! I'll be watching this thread. =)

fyneyoungstunna

I was saying that instead of having the living area on ground level, put it at the top and then the garage at ground level.

@tech 18 b: I wanna see more of that truck. PM me the link.

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onehundredoctane

Jimmy, that's about the size of a building I would like to work out of if I went pre-fabbed. What kind of cost is tied up in that?

Fyneyounstunna, that is my current plan. Shop area on ground level, entertainment area / storage upstairs.

Super_OK_S13

honestly I have no clue what my great uncle paid for it.. I measured about 25'x40' outside. I want to guess between 10k-20k depending on slab thickness, height, and rafter design.. when we bought the property it was there.



heres the inside showing how I have my car.



The rafters are I think 11' so a high lift won't work. but down the road I do want to put a max jax 80" lift like broadfield has in his place.

like I said, I would check out garage journal and go through the builds section. some are INSANE 2 story museum style shops... and others are little workshops in a 1 car garage.

SimpleSexy180

how is sound in one of those containers? im not looking to live in one of those, but for working on a project or simply having a "grip" of people over with an amazing lot of cars would be ideal,. car life garaging is cool..

onehundredoctane

How structurally sound? They stack these 5 tall or more on freight ships. . . pretty sure they have a weight bearing capacity of 60-65,000 lbs.

GDChoi

pretty cool idea

K_style

An awesome thread indeed. I've been searching for a house to buy for sometime but it was the same issue. Small garage with too dang big house or decent garage with too small house.

I am subscribing this !!!

collegekid

I am definitely interested in this as well. I'm mostly here to question the legal processes and stuff.

I know my city is super strict about building stuff that your house doesnt already come with. What are some of the legal processes that people that built this kind of stuff went through?

I really love the tron apartment/garage thing. Even my parents have toyed with the idea of filling in our in ground pool and building a huge shed in my backyard.

Future240

Subbed for garage pr0ns.

Great thread idea.

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onehundredoctane

This I am not sure on. Being that we are planning on buying property out in the country, and not in the city limits, I'm not worrying with building codes, etc. I'm treating this as a "shed" if anyone asks lol.

Since I've started gathering information on this project a co-worker has expressed interested in building a guest house for his in-laws on part of the 28 acres he has. His idea consists of a 40 ft container as the main level, and a 20 ft container upstairs to serve as the master bedroom with the open space above the rest of the 40 ft container used as a patio. Pretty cool how adaptable these things are!

mlongmoor

This was interesting so im bumping it see if anybody else has some good info/ideas/pictures they can add to this thread.

Benedict

Bumping this up to see what other people can add.

Also, try a Google search on "barndominium" and check out the kinds of prefab steel buildings available. Some are built with garage space in mind, others for horses, toys, etc

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onehundredoctane

Well, this project probably won't get to see the light of day, my wife and I just purchased a house with a HUGE 2 bay garage with built in storage. I'm excited about it, and also sad I won't be able to build a container garage now.

drscooper

Congratulations on the awesome purchase. What are you ideas with the garage? anything neat?

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onehundredoctane

The garage already has some added storage hanging down from the ceiling along the back wall. First plans (after unpacking and trying to organize it all) are to add some more hanging storage that will go above the garage door. When the garage door is raised there is a TON of wasted space above it.

Something like this:


The only difference is that mine will be a MUCH TALLER storage area, and I plan to incorporate a small ladder into the wall to make it easy to access.

suzannethompson

Hi there,
Your research work seems to be going well. The kind of constructions you are looking for are tough to get though. Prefabs usually have a small garage and a big house or vice versa. But the kind of garage and house you are hunting for are available rarely. However, I did find such big metal garages along with a big house at metal buildings denver. They are providing such structures at really affordable prices. You can try and search over there.