Building underground garage ?

Scaf

Scaf

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Ok, so I am heading for retirement and have always dreamed of moving to a property with a 4 car garage.
But finding such a property close to my existing home and without making other compromises is proving impossible.
As I look to the future I am wondering how practical and costly it would be to build a garage under my drive, accessed via a lift for the cars and stairs for me.
It sounds mad, but to rent somewhere would be £10k pa and would be offsite, and given I hope to use it for the next 25years I could “man math” a decent budget.
Has anyone on here got experience of such constructions for themselves or others.
Any advice would be much appreciated
 
I make do with a 3 car garage that came with our house. I did have to renovate it and fit several steel beams to make the standard 2 m wide door openings into 2.5 m for easy access without having to faff around folding mirrors etc.
The upside to a stand alone building like that is that we have a small 1 bedroom flat above the garage for staying guests.
Love the idea of an underground bunker style garage but suspect it would involve far greater costs than a ‘standard’ building.
Looking forward to following this Sam.
:excellent:
 
Bebs said:
I make do with a 3 car garage that came with our house. I did have to renovate it and fit several steel beams to make the standard 2 m wide door openings into 2.5 m for easy access without having to faff around folding mirrors etc.
The upside to a stand alone building like that is that we have a small 1 bedroom flat above the garage for staying guests.
Love the idea of an underground bunker style garage but suspect it would involve far greater costs than a ‘standard’ building.
Looking forward to following this Sam.
:excellent:
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Agreed, above ground would be my preference - but I don’t have the option of an above ground garage due to the plot layout.
 
Second that Brian I really want to see this happen Sam.
I suppose you have to find an Architect first.
 
sionie1 said:
https://www.edsuk.com/parking-systems/rising-car-lift/

Drop them a message and see what they come back with..
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Thanks - the “lift” aspect quite straight forward, it’s that garage bit that I need some insight into and yes, I intend to get an architect if I thinks it’s viable.

Original thoughts were to him under the house, but that would involve “underpinning at £1000 per metre plus all other costs, so under the drive feels like a better option.

A chap nearby has one, but he built his “whilst building his house.
 
Although planning is eased a little it would be worth checking out first if the local authority would support the plan.

You would need to ensure there are no utilities in the preferred location and that the water table is much lower than your proposed unit. Also, what is the ground like? If you have bedrock close it will add another 0 to your costs.
 
Bedrock is probably an advantage in your situation, depending on what it is. A nice bit of unweathered sandstone is probably the ideal. I’m assuming you’ve not got much room or you’d build a conventional garage. If the house isn’t on bedrock you’d need to support its foundations. Sheet piling probably isn’t a solution due to proximity to your house so you’d probably have to go down the route of cast in situ piles in that case. Then there the neighbours houses, roads, sewers etc etc. The cost of having to deal with that in an alluvial soil would balance out the extra time needed to dig into bedrock (assuming it’s not granite).

Digging a hole in the ground is a piece of **** it’s what else happens that’s the tricky bit.
 
Sam, can you grade your property/drive differently such that you can create a new pad?
 
One of your biggest costs is likely to be trucking out and dumping the spoil that you excavate. A neighbour was lucky enough to own a large field next to his house, and the cheapest solution was to push all the topsoil to one end, dump and spread the excavated material and then put the topsoil back. Whole field ended up about 1/4 a metre higher.
 
We have been looking at garage building for some time and quickly moved away from anything underground primarily based on costs, ground work costs are big and the deeper you go the bigger they get.

We have planning permission for a 8x12m 4 car garage with room above half of it to allow ramps in the other half. Given the proximity to the house due to land space we wanted something that look less like a garage and something more like an outside room and got a friendly architect to draw up some designs but build costs are looking astronomical circa €150-200k, €25k plus is the groundwork which requires digging out the ground for the back half of the garage and creating a turning area plus foundations, another €10k to repave all the rear patio area mainly as material costs have sky rocketed over here.

Current house on right proposed new build on left

Screenshot 2024-09-13 at 23.07.33.png

Screenshot 2024-09-13 at 23.08.04.png
 
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Don’t have experience in regards to myself or a house but I was a project manager of a firm where we had 7acre plot and they wanted to excavate underground parking for the flats, around 20 spaces, the costs was so vast that we didn’t go through with it and built outside spaces instead
 
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MarkMas said:
One of your biggest costs is likely to be trucking out and dumping the spoil that you excavate. A neighbour was lucky enough to own a large field next to his house, and the cheapest solution was to push all the topsoil to one end, dump and spread the excavated material and then put the topsoil back. Whole field ended up about 1/4 a metre higher.
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My sister has an 8 acre paddock so that could be an option.
 
Sewers rubber back of the property, water would need to be diverted but that’s simple, electric won’t be too difficult either.

If we stick to the drive we should get away with the need to underpin the house.

Water table should not be an issue and found will be chalk and clay.
 
20 years ago it cost us over 10k just to get to ground level for our modest 1.5 car garage. Since there was a sewer quite deep below, we had to get 12 concrete piles drilled before the concrete raft could be poured. Building on made up ground, where a previous house had been 100 years ago, also complicated things as the edges of any digging gave way like sand which was a bit disconcerting as it was on the boundary next to the neighbouring house!
Eb
 
Is this underground garage to supplement an existing garage, 2+2, or the only garage to accommodate 4 cars?
Floor area for 4 cars is massive to be made underground!
 
Also would it be one car wide by 4 cars long, or 2 cars wide?
How would you maneuver the cars to the car lift?
Would be a right pain if you have to lift a car out, park it somewhere, to get a car out behind, through the same lift.
Years ago at an old house built a triple garage like a wedge of cheese, with a single front garage door with a single width driveway.
Could easily get 2 cars in the traditional front back, with the third smaller in the back corner (Lotus Elise).
This was all fine but a right pain if you wanted either of the back cars out of the garage.
Even in our current house with a double garage, a few years ago I widened the drive in front of the garage so I could park the daily to the side of the garage, to avoid having a car parked in front of the garage doors.
I want to open the garage door, and drive out either car without having to get cars in front of the garage out of the way first.
 
Sounds great, but expensive. My wife wanted to convert our garage to an extra living space, and they wanted £20k for a relatively straightforward job.
 
I used this company back in the early 2,000's went up and visited them told them what I wanted.
They could do exactly that did the plans for me to submit and Bobs your Uncle.
I got the concrete base laid and a course of engineering bricks too.
The building was up in a day.

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If space is tight, surely the ramp angle to go down/up would be rather steep.

Sounds like an expensive job
 
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