My wife and I decided it was time to downsize our home and find a place suitable for the next chapter in our lives. We found a wonderful place about sixty miles from downtown Atlanta in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains.
We moved from five bedrooms on two floors plus a basement with a two car garage to three bedrooms with a carport, no garage and no basement. This represented the perfect opportunity to downsize not only our home, but also our entire collection of stuff.
However, I knew from the beginning that I wanted a garage and shop. Since the property is more than large enough to allow building a detached garage, the only problem was to determine the ideal location and get started. The carport and house are at the end of the driveway on the right. So the logical place for the garage was at the end of the driveway on the left. There were a couple of other locations that would have been suitable, but the one chosen was by far superior.
There was, however, one disadvantage to this location. The ground is sloped there and the garage would have to be dug into the hillside and the north wall of the garage would end up being a concrete wall in the ground. This has the advantage of providing some natural cooling. Since the garage and shop will not be air conditioned this would be a nice feature. The downside is, of course, the additional cost of the eight foot high concrete retaining wall. I estimate that the concrete wall represents roughly half of the cost of the concrete work. With the slab, foundation and footing is the other half of the cost.
Over the course of the next few months I will document the process of building the garage. I plan on doing much of the work myself. But, I am not crazy enough to do the things that are beyond my ability. I will hire work done for those things that are beyond by ability or skill.
In the next post I will discuss planning.
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