Close quarters — Making the most of your one-car garage

Architect Warren Lloyd and his wife, Jennifer, live in the Yalecrest area of Salt Lake City and have three children and a newly remodeled home, a home that was featured last fall on both the Heritage Foundation tour and the Green Home tour.

Their garage is an 80-year-old one-car structure. Lloyd says he wasn't trying to make a statement when he decided not to build a bigger garage during the remodel. No statement except for the fact that he likes to preserve an original building.

Recently Lloyd showed the Deseret Morning News around his 180-square-foot garage.

DMN: That's a pretty garage door. WL: It's just a commercial aluminum frame. And then the infill is a 3-Form panel. Are you familiar with 3-Form? They are a Salt Lake company.

DMN: They were named one of the nation's top 10 "green" companies (for their building products) last year? WL: Yeah, they are a pretty cool company. This is just corrugated plastic. But it's UV stable. Most of what they are doing is that eco-resin. We needed translucent material, to get some more light in. Crawford Door supplied the door and we just bought those plastic panels in 4-by-8 sheets and cut them. Very simple.

DMN: Before you remodeled, was your garage kind of leaning, like so many old garages? WL: No. It was straight. You know you cannot build a garage like this now, because the engineering doesn't work — on paper. And yet this has been through 80 winters without falling down.

We focused so much on the house that we ran out of money long before we got to the garage. We did have to raise the door head about six inches so it would fit our Toyota Sequoia. It's a little larger than the standard car.

One thing about single-car garages, current codes say you need 2 feet or so of shear wall on each side of a door to give you some wall there.

DMN: And you've got? WL: Oh, 8 inches. (He laughs.)

DMN: Looks like you store lumber in the rafters. WL: And there was only the one collar tie and I had all that stuff up there, and I started looking at it, and I thought, "Man, am I nuts?" So we added more collar ties. And we doubled up on the rafters just to reinforce the roof. Because, again, the rafters didn't meet code anymore. About the third day the carpenters were out here working away, they said, "You know, we could have had this torn down and rebuilt by now."

DMN: You do have a shed in back. What is in it? WL: That's a Tuff Shed. We tried to get someone to haul it off, but Jennie said, "No, not until you figure out what to do with the bikes." DMN: Which, apparently, you never did.

DMN: If you had a bigger garage, what would you put in it? WL: Another car. But you can see this garage also doubles as my workshop. So I'd probably start stockpiling more junk, if I had more room.