Garage conversion plus brick-built garden shed? Good idea?

[LittenTree]

Was going for a walk a couple of days ago with DH and came across a bloke converting a garage. We live on a bog-standard estate so all the houses are broadly similar. Had a long chat to him and he reckons that he could do ours for £5000 (there's already an access to the house, needs the floor lifting, the front wall building in, insulating and a radiator).... BUT what to do with The Stuff?

Now, I readily concede that a fair bit of stuff in the garage could be disposed of, but we'd need somewhere for:

4 bikes and paraphernalia like helmets and racks
wellies + hiking boots
Tools
Water softener salt blocks
A fair bit of camping stuff
electrical leads
cans of paint/DIY cleaning and fixing stuff
A trailer!- BUT I think I could leave that at mum's.

We have a wooden garden shed (8 foot wide, 12 foot long) with a winter's log supply, the garden tools, my bonsai pots and tools, the bird feeding stuff, fertilizers, bamboo, mower and strimmer.

Really I need a 'rethink' around the whole storage thing in my house. I'm well on the way BUT the small spare room has still got a lot of stuff that could be gotten rid of, I'm sure; and the garage still bears the 'scars' from having 2 household's worth of stuff in there (sold a house abroad 3 years ago then all our 'abroad' stuff arrived in the UK to join 5 year's accrual of similar stuff here...)

I also confess that when we moved in here 2 years ago (with all The Stuff) I just knew we'd make the mistake of not biting the bullet and making Grand Plans first up; instead we laid a lovely cobbled patio on what was the previous owner's hard standing (for a wendy house). That is precisely where the brick-built shed should go! OR we demolish the garden shed and brick build there BUT it'd have to be bigger and would therefore impinge on where my lovely new lean-to greenhouse sits against the house wall..... But I think a shed would have to be 'properly built' to protect the stuff inside, wouldn't it? And could maybe be used as a home office if someone down-the-line wanted to.

I should add we'd like to convert the garage because our DSs are just becoming teenagers and we don't 'approve' of them disappearing up to their bedrooms with laptops etc- we'd rather they were in a downstairs room where they could also have their Wii etc (and mates if they were the type of lads who brought mates home!). And, of course, I know the boys will have to live at home way into their 20s so we may as well do this now, not leave it.

A loft conversion would have cost £50,000 ( I got a quote), so no!

So would you go for it? Convert the garage then put a proper shed where my lovely patio is?

We converted our integral garage for very similar reasons and it's the best money we ever spent, but we do have a hangover problem with nowhere to store the bikes - we are mid terrace so no easy access to the garden shed.

Is your patio lovely because it is a lovely place to sit and to be, or is it just lovely because you have lovely (expensive) cobbles down there? If the former then no way, if the latter then I'd put the shed there.

Make sure your conversion is very well soundproofed and has a billion power points.

Thanks for the input!

I must say that the patio is a thing of beauty because I spent hours building it! It has a large collection of potted hostas on it which, to be honest, get far too much sun (if we get any more this year...). The cobbles were salvaged from a skip and can be reused, actually.

For wishing the impossible, I wish the house had cost us £8,000 less; the garden was a tree-less oblong, they hadn't built the conservatory (hence £8k) or shed and we'd been able to Get In There and design a conservatory cum sun room plus storage shed and greenhouse (as in different rooms, not all one big room!) which would have solved all the problems in one go! I could then have designed the garden from scratch, too, placing the 'mature' trees where I wanted them. DH is also a man of faint heart: experience has taught me that he's loathe to alter whatever we inherit, as if the previous owner's tastes must be preserved. I repaint rooms when he's at work! He likes the end result but would still be dithering over exactly which shade of magnolia to paint the entire downstairs, 2 years later.

Have a look at the floorplan here

most of the houses on this estate have done this

Makes a room for the kids, but you leave the garage door on the front, and have a brick built bike/stuff store with front access.

identical to ours

-though we have a utility to the back of the kitchen with the back door where theirs is. And theirs looks nicer than ours!

Do you think we might have too small a room left if we carve out a bike store?? Assuming their garage is identical to ours in size, it's 5.36m (17'7) x 2.51m (8'3)

OK, am going to post a new thread regarding how big the store needs to be!!

I think a small store at the front could be your answer. Would 6' do it? An 11' room sounds reasonable. It might also have to added benefit of making it less 'garagey' and more like a proper room because the dimensions would be more equal.

Only problem might be having sufficient light? Normally the old garage door becomes a wall and window. The only ones with a store at the front I have seen go straight through the house so the room has proper light provided from the back wall windows but your garage backs onto kitchen/utility. Do you have a sufficient side window space or will it be expensive to create?

I think we will get a window put in the side of the garage. Unfortunately it just faces a wooden fence though the distance between us and our (identical) neighbours house wall (which is blank) is 2 garden paths widths, iyswim. I will shortly be asking MN about climbing plants that require no direct sunlight... .

here's the other thread about carving the garage up!