Thursday, July 24, 2014

A Garage!

When we built the house, we had maxed out the buildable portion of the lot and figured a garage would probably never be possible. However, about a year ago I looked into the wetland regulations and found out that there were provisions on constrained lots where one could gain permission to essentially purchase back the right to use a portion of your own land. Our wetland consultant wasn't certain we could gain approval, but it was certainly worth a try.

I prepared two schemes, Option A which was the desired plan, and Option B, which was my fallback option. Option A was a small rectangular two car garage.

And Option B was a trapezoid.

However, the Conservation Commission was very much against allowing the disturbance of anything within 50' of the former cranberry bog and wetland, but gave approval for Option B. This was last October. Now I have some catching up to do on the blog posts.
 
It's an odd shape and makes the construction a little more difficult, but is certainly much better than no garage at all. The rear of it follows the wetland buffer boundary, the left side parallels the house and deck, and the right side parallels the lot sideline. Here's what the garage will look like.
The view from the street will look pretty normal, but if you stand back far enough, you will see both sides of the garage at once, giving just a bit of a fun house effect.