We have had houses with double garages since 1978.
In 2000 we needed to complete a tax-deferred exchange and buy a property in Northern Virginia that cost at least $350,000 to cover the amount we for which we had sold our home in Laguna Niguel, California.
A friend suggested that builder's models made ideal rentals. We found a builder's model we loved and we bought it. It had French doors at the head of the driveway where the garage door would have been and a finished L-shaped outer office wrapping around an inner office in the very nicely finished area used as a sales office by the builder, but originally intended to be a garage.
The builder offered to replace the French doors and remove the partitions and make a real garage out of it when he finally quit leasing it back from us in 2002.
By then we had 2 family members practicing real estate full time and were sort of tired of having so much of our house wolfed up by printers, computers, fax machines, files, etc.
So we said, "No, leave it as office space. We'll just park on the driveway and live without a garage."
We have done that for 5 years now. Our unfinished basement has a walkup but there are items too large and/or heavy to get down and up, e.g. a riding mower etc. It turns out that there are a great many things we were used to putting in the garage that aren't quite as handy to have to either get rid of, put outdoors with or without a cover in our fenced yard, or drag up and down the basement stairs.
Would we do it again? Absolutely. Because we love having this 441 square feet of functioal professional office space. What we really want in the next house is the office space AND a garage.
This was posted to see if any of you have gone through such transitions and whether or not you would do it again?
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