Small garage/house/yard guys, how do you do it?

I've always had a big yard for as far as I can remember, grew up with 2.5 acres at my parents place, had 2 acres at my last house with a real 2 car garage (not one of those 1.5 car deals), and my current place is 2.5 acres with a 2.5 car garage. All these places have obviously had plenty of yard for multiple vehicle parking.

Well I'm trying to cut back and move to a smaller place closer to mine and SWMBO work, the problem I'm running into is that all the houses are something in the neighborhood of .25 acre lots. How am I supposed to park my extended cab truck, car trailer, project car, SWMBO car, 14 foot boat, and my DD in a house with a 1.5 car garage and a postage stamp yard?

I'm currently trying to get rid of my DD and get a motorcycle for that duty, but I still want my truck, trailer and project/racecar. I'd really like to hang on to the boat also.

How do you guys with small yards and garages do this?

You get creative. Almost all my work is done back around where the F150 is. I can fit three vehicles in the drive. Four we we get bumper-to-bumper. Store the cheap tools in the shed an the expensive ones inside the house.

I recently replaced the engine in the ranger. When the cherry-picker started sinking into the driveway, we pulled it out with a come-along. It made things interesting.

There is no way to predict the problems you may come across. You can only deal with them as you come across them.

Rent space in a RV / trailer parking place. I park my trailer at one. Plenty of boats and on-hold car projects there. Kinda cool.

I personally don't like to accumulate too many 'projects' especially ones that look like junk. I like my neighborhood and don't want to drag down house prices by making my driveway look like a junk yard.

get a long driveway. Make sure the garage is detached and behind the house, then the driveway can run all the way past the house. I have a 2 car garage and a 4/5 car driveway. (single car width, which is more than a little annoying, but works).

pave all the grass. more work space and less time spend doing yardwork means more time for wrenching!

I rent a very secure warehouse space with a few buddies in an old industrial park. Inside, heated, plenty of room to work, and you can make as much noise as you want. The whole place is $1000, but between four guys (and one has like six cars so he pays about half) it ain't too bad.

I have 2 in the garage (1 not running), 2 in the driveway outside the garage, and 3 in the street. It's not convenient.

Oh yea. My landlord was nice enough to let me park cars in his business lot. By city ordinance, I cannot park unlicensed vehicles in the driveway.

SlickDizzy wrote: I rent a very secure warehouse space with a few buddies in an old industrial park. Inside, heated, plenty of room to work, and you can make as much noise as you want. The whole place is $1000, but between four guys (and one has like six cars so he pays about half) it ain't too bad.

This was something I thought about, and if I had a more shop like environment then I could probably pay for for my portion of the rent by doing smaller repair stuff on other peoples cars, not a full fledged business just tune up type stuff to cover rent.

t25torx wrote: Well I'm trying to cut back and move to a smaller place closer to mine and SWMBO work, the problem I'm running into is that all the houses are something in the neighborhood of .25 acre lots. How am I supposed to park my extended cab truck, car trailer, project car, SWMBO car, 14 foot boat, and my DD in a house with a 1.5 car garage and a postage stamp yard? I'm currently trying to get rid of my DD and get a motorcycle for that duty, but I still want my truck, trailer and project/racecar. I'd really like to hang on to the boat also. How do you guys with small yards and garages do this?

We, for the most part, don't. Highlighted your problems. The only place you're cutting back is real estate, so the solution is either off-site storage or actually downsizing by getting rid of stuff. Store your boat at a marina? How small is your project/race car and trailer? Can you get rid of your full size extended cab and DD and replace both with a smaller, more efficient truck? Or can you go to a smaller, lighter race car i.e. a sports racer, formula car, or kart from a full size car, downsizing the trailer too?

skierd has it right. I have a Miata and a trailer that I tow with the Miata. I'm looking at replacing it with a GTO, or a Mustang, or a Corvette and beater wagon, or a Volt and [older miata, or LBC, or similar]... I'm looking at boats that I can lift by hand and can put on the trailer I already have. Gotta make space somehow.

How am I supposed to park my extended cab truck, car trailer, project car, SWMBO car, 14 foot boat, and my DD in a house with a 1.5 car garage and a postage stamp yard?

You dont. I like my hobby enough that i let it dictate a certain amount of distance from suburbia. I guess some people like suburbia enough that they let it dictate a certain amount of distance from their hobbies, too, which i guess makes me a 'car guy' and them 'suburbia guys'. Whatever floats your.. house?

I sold my tow vehicle and car hauler and now have a DD ranger and a tow dolly. The saturn autocross car and my mustang take up the rest of my driveway. my '76 c10 is at my dad's house. Also, I don't collect stuff like I used to and overhead storage in the garage is a lifesaver.

I found a rental garage - 1 bay of a 3 bay residential detached garage, on craigslist, and have rented that for years to store boat, canoe, other gear. A single guy with no stuff owns the house and garage. I recently moved to a 2 bay garage under an apartment adjacent to a business owned by a co-worker for just a bit more. That deal worked out well for all - more space for me, the tenant works at the business and can't afford the whole apartment/garage and the landlord gets his employee close by and gets to rent both spaces. I'm paying more than half what a one car size storage unit rents for nearby, and I have lights and power. I've wanted to find and buy a garage/building nearby but I haven't found one and I don't/can't operate a business out of it and the costs (factoring taxes, insurance, etc.) would be much higher. I don't work in either space I rent - I save that for the 2 car garage I have at home.

A good thread. My wife really prefers city life so we've always rented in city neighborhoods. Usually relegated to street parking, but now looking to buy in the next year or so. That didn't matter as much because I had no time for projects and we got to work on public transit or biking, but soon I'll have more time for fun stuff AND we're going to both need reliable cars to get to wrok. I think I'm going to be limited by the law to a garage around 500 sq feet or so (has to to be <15% of total lot size, most are in the 3000-4000 sq ft range where we're looking). To make it worse, street parking is highly restricted and may not even be available. I had hoped to have a track car, fair weather dd, and a winter dd in addition to her commuter, but at this point it's looking like even three cars are a stretch. Thought about renting storage space somewhere, but I'll just never work on the track car that way. Build a garage as big as I possibly can and add a lift for vehicle storage? Hope for a variance? We shall see.

Good points made by all. My Nissan is in my aunt's barn located in a more... Rural area.

Vigo wrote:

How am I supposed to park my extended cab truck, car trailer, project car, SWMBO car, 14 foot boat, and my DD in a house with a 1.5 car garage and a postage stamp yard?

You dont. I like my hobby enough that i let it dictate a certain amount of distance from suburbia. I guess some people like suburbia enough that they let it dictate a certain amount of distance from their hobbies, too, which i guess makes me a 'car guy' and them 'suburbia guys'. Whatever floats your.. house?

I wouldn't say I'm a suburbia guy, all the places I have lived so far have been rural, but I'm trying to cut back on expenses and lead a more frugal life, and here lately I've found myself growing less found of spending 45 minutes in the car just to get 20 miles to my house (damn snowbirds), spending 2 hours cutting my grass, and spending close to $200 a month to cool a 2600sqft house.

I'll have to look into garage codes for the area I want to move to and see if there's a limit to how big they are, as I would rather keep my project car close by so I just stroll out to the garage when I feel like working.

Yeah I probably should cut out the car hauler, I need to go back to that thread on ultra-light car trailers to see what is available. If i could get down to SWMBO's car, a small cabover car hauler, bike and boat, that might be doable in the smaller space.

Thanks for the ideas so far guys, keep 'em coming.

I have lived as far as 60 miles from my 'car work area' (when i went to college). Ive stored cars in 3 separate cities in south texas at the same time. My partner rents studio space for her ceramics work which has always been at least 15 miles away. Ive lived on huge-ish plots of land that still had no good space for working on cars. I can tell you from experience that all of these things suck. Im on the hunt for a house right now, but i dont hold out much hope, because what my partner and i need is a 1-2 bedroom house with 2 separate work areas totaling roughly the area of a 4-car garage (although bigger would be better), and preferably one or both work areas would be detached from the house. Oh, and there CANNOT be a neighborhood association. And im really basically limiting myself to one area of town for various reasons.

So, yeah. I've figured out what i DONT want, and what i DO want is something noone else wants, so the supply on the used market is basically zilch. But for the time being, i'd much rather live with family (with acceptable car facilities and no HOA) at nearly 30y/o, hoard money, and plot to build something i actually want, then 'enjoy' the 'dignity' of spending most of my money on something that in no way shape or form actually fits my list of wants. A 3-bedroom house with only one garage in a neighborhood where i couldnt keep 10 cars on my property might as well be a teepee to me. I feel like most people are willing to compromise much more than i currently am. Most people probably feel the exact opposite, that i'm compromising too much for my/our 'hobbies'.

There's compromise and then there's "most properties don't meet my needs". I'm in the same boat as my wife and I are starting to go through this now. We started renting a 1000sq ft 2 bedroom house with a single car garage in September and it's my first house (not counting while in college when I was broke) with a garage in my life. With looking at starting a family, plus the powersports toys (my motorcycle, two snowmobiles, and a trailer, and we'd like to add another motorcycle and an ATV. Plus gear. Plus winter gear. Plus a couple kayaks ) we're out of space already. Utilities are outrageous up here in winter (currently about $400 for oil and pellets for heat, and $250 for electric, thankfully we're on a well and septic) so we need efficiency.

I basically need at least a 2 car garage for just the toys, and it would be really nice if it had the option of being heated so I can work on them in winter. At least a 3rd bedroom for kids and family/friend visiting from the lower 48, but don't want to go too much larger or too old/drafty since we have to heat it. It would be nice to have a lot big enough to expand on too, and have a house that isn't laid out horribly or made of 2x4 construction or built on permafrost. Sadly we can really only afford the toys or the house that can fit the toys, but probably not both..

I've got almost half an acre with a 1-car garage and a 6-car double-width driveway.

Being able to drive to the backyard is huge. My front yard is tiny, so I have lots of room in the back. A shed is also great, I've got a 10x10? that I put everything that isn't a car or a project in. The result? The Trooper lives in the garage, the daily driver lives in the driveway in front of it, the roommate parks on the other side of the driveway, I've got room in the backyard for the canoe/trailer/other projects, and whenever I've got more than the usual number of cars I just park them in front of the daily driver in the driveway.

Oh, and I keep a motorcycle on my front porch, in an unused corner. Not the classiest thing to do, but I've got a hedge blocking it and I keep everything neat and tidy. At some point, I'm planning on putting up one of those metal storage roof things in the backyard so I have a place for the trailer, motorcycle, etc.

I just bought six acres in the middle of nowhere for cheap. I will build a garage. Cars will accumulate. The city is no place for a lower-middle-class gearhead.

don't fret on the house thing guys. I know they are few and far between, but I found a house for sale in madison back when I was looking there. It was a 2 bedroom, detached 3 car garage (+ bench space up front) with a separate fully covered carport next to the house. Huge driveway on a corner lot at the end of a small cul-de-sac. price really wasn't any different because of the garage sitch (remember, not a big draw to most people). Wouldve been perfect but the tax credit went away and then my job situation changed. oh well.

There are other car guys in the world and they every once in a while move out of a house....

I did the most and had the most when I had the least about of space.
At one point I had 4 cars and a 1.5 car garage (that one car went into.) I did a lot of car work in that little garage.
I then had a two car garage (that I barely could get two cars into) and they were small...Miata and MR2
I now have a 3 car and with other crap, I can only get one car in. I have plans for this spring/summer for a major garage overhaul. Ive got to get two cars in and tools organized.
It is a weird property. I have over 80ft x 40ft of concrete pad. It is almost like more of a parking lot than it is a driveway. I have had 8 cars (guests) parked out there before and none of the cars were blocked in. If I am willing to block in a few cars, I can easily get a dozen cars out there.
All totaled, about a 10th of an acre of concrete on a 1/2 acre lot (20% of my property is concrete.)
If I needed more space, I could park a few at the neighbor property which is a 4 unit condo building. One old lady there does not drive. It has crossed my mind to inquire about renting her two car garage space should I ever need it. Beyond that, the club's parking lot next to that.

Unfortunately, all my parking and storage space is out front. Nowhere to hide anything.

The city is no place for a lower-middle-class gearhead.

Well put. Sadly.

My friend who lives way out of town in the country just found out he has to put a privacy fence around his house in the middle of a giant field so he can keep his cars there, and that's on a dead end road you have to try to find, where about every other house has a few extra cars E36 M3ting up the yard too. It seems no place is perfectly safe, but you certainly have better chances with fewer neighbors.

Skierd, i have a similar situation to you in that i need my workspaces to be able to be airconditioned. There are a decent number of houses with big-ish metal workshops on the property, but if it cant be cost-effectively insulated or climate controlled, that just means i cant use it half the year. The temp inside an uninsulated metal building out here is 110-120+ in the summer. Carports are much cooler than metal sheds, and the carport im using already gets too hot to have any fun for about half the year.

So I found what I would need to replace the truck and trailer with.

Of course there were only 2 of these ever made, but that's beside the point.

JohnRW1621, if I could find a setup like your's it would probably be in the 350k plus range in the area I want to move. I have the same garage setup right now, built super deep though, I can fit my extended cab truck inside with room to spare in front of it.