Garage (house)

For other uses, see Garage (disambiguation).

A garage in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The Hermitage garage
by Nicholas II in The State Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

A residential garage is part of a home, or an associated building, designed or used for storing a vehicle or vehicles. In some places the term is used synonymously with "carport", though that term normally describes a structure that is not completely enclosed.

British residential garages

Up-and-over garage door

Insulation of Sectional garage door

Those British homes that have a garage have a single or double garage either built into the main building (thus subtracting from the living area), detached within the grounds, often the back garden, or in a communal block. As the typical size of a family car has increased significantly over the past thirty years some garages can no longer be comfortably used to park a car and increasingly the garage is used as a general storage space.

The common term for these structures in the first decades of the Twentieth Century was motor house. Traditionally, garage doors were wooden, opening either as two leaves or sliding horizontally. Newer garages were fitted with metal up-and-over doors. Increasingly, in new homes, such doors are electrically operated.

Traditionally a small British single garage is 8 by 16 feet (2.4 × 4.9 m), a medium is 9 by 18 feet (2.7 × 5.5 m), and a large single garage is 10 by 20 feet (3.0 × 6.1 m). Family saloons are bigger on average than was the case 3 years ago, so the larger size is now preferred. A typical large family car like the Ford Mondeo is about 15 by 6 feet (4.6 × 1.8 m), so even with the larger size garage it is necessary to park to one side to be able to open the driver's door wide enough to get into it.

United States residential garages

A modern one-car garage, in the USA.

In most American single family and town houses featuring a garage, the garage has a door on the side of the building for vehicles to enter and stay. Most garage doors open upward using an electric chain drive, which can usually be remotely controlled from the resident's vehicle with a small radio transmitter. Garages are connected to the nearest road with a driveway. Interior space for one or two cars is typical, and garages built since the 1960s typically have a door directly connecting the garage to the interior of the house (an "attached garage"). Earlier garages were often detached and located in the back yard of the house, accessed either via a long driveway or from an alley.

In the past, garages were often separate buildings from the house ("detached garage"), almost resembling modern sheds. On occasion, a garage would be built with an apartment above it, which could be rented out. As automobiles became more popular, the idea of attaching the garage directly to the home grew into a common practice. While a person with a separate garage must walk outdoors in any type of weather, a person with an attached garage has a much shorter walk inside a building.

Garages are often where the attic entrance is located. Used also to store tools, bicycles, lawn mowers and other such items, most garages have unfinished concrete floors. Since they are heavily used for storage, and as work space for home improvement projects, some home owners do not use their garage to store their car, preferring a carport as an alternative solution. . Some garages contain a separate storage room to partially alleviate the problem.

Garage Door companies often install or repair the garage door as the process could be dangerous and require great deal of technical skills to complete the job safely and correctly. Garage door come manual and automatic. Both manual garage doors and automatic garage doors operate on spring tension, with time and extensive use the springs get weak and break. Replacing the springs is one of the most dangerous procedures due to the large force these springs carry. There are a few basic guidelines for installing garage doors.

The following references offer good articles on how to replace garage door springs: 1. Garage Door Mart article on Spring replacement. 2. Advanced Garage Door Inc offers a blog on How to Repair Garage Door Springs?

Notable garages

Hewlett-Packard, in the Silicon Valley, started its business in a garage, that is now a landmark.

See also

• Parking