Great article! At first I thought we had identical property-envy issues as well as day-dreaming-websurfer habits. But, you have built a real garage on your property. Except for the height limitations you can have a car or two, and open the doors and hood and work on it. My super-charming, 1920 gingerbread house’s garage doesn’t even afford enough space to open a door wide enough to enable working under the dashboard of my baby. Fifteen years ago my town’s building inspector even got his panties in a bunch when we re-built our unsafe, crumbling front steps topped with pre-fab, stone steps (you know, the slabs that rest on top of the brick structure of the steps, that are more wear-resistant to salt and ice) that he said were now a couple of inches wider than the old ones, thus putting me over the 75% lot development/improvement ratio for proper drainage under NJ law. (We sawed off the offending overhangs) The stone step “tops” do not even touch the ground, so how can they prevent rainwater drainage? Well, even if I had a math degree, if I wished to build your garage or even expand my garage ... fu-get-about-it! Of course my friend is jealous of my 0.92 car garage because his house, like many in the neighborhood, had their garage space converted to family room space and “sealed up” 35 yrs ago. Nevertheless, your article reminded me of my very same “we could get this for that” web-jaunts in search of VT, NH & ME real estate with a car barn-man cave that suits my ideal picture of retirement; Only my wife is not as keen on the idea as yours. When I show her the same type of gems that you featured above, she usually says something like “nice” but she’d “never want to live there.” 😞 So, I’m content just to look, while my tiny 50’x100” lot with charming house, full of character, just outside of NYC continues to appreciate to new highs (as do my property taxes - thanks NJ). But, I have found, as another reader here pointed out, that Hemmings .com has just the ticket - a tab next to their classified listings that is just for car-collector-friendly real estate, so car guys can dream about the cars they’d want and then a car-barn to put them in. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to check out CarProperty.com. Since I’m just daydreaming here, it doesn’t matter that the listings are old and expired!
... View more