Garage Builders in Gardiner, ME

Gardiner's downtown neighborhoods were laid out before the car, so lots run narrow and a garage often has to sit at the back corner. A carriage-house design, with a steeper roof, trim boards at the corners and paneled doors, fits that setting and reads as part of the property instead of a modern intrusion.

Inside the historic district, the city may review how a new building looks from the street, so our drawings spell out the siding profile and the door style. A one-bay at 16 feet wide or a two-bay at 24 usually fits behind an older house, and gravel runs to the doors so there is no apron to heave.

Adding a garage to an older Gardiner house means joining new framing to old, and the two rarely line up perfectly. We measure the existing walls and roof pitch, then frame the addition so the rooflines meet cleanly and the siding courses carry across without a visible jog at the corner.

Code requires a fire-rated separation between the garage and the living space, which means fire-rated wallboard where the two share a wall and a fire-rated door between the garage and the kitchen or hall. The addition gets its own frost wall, pinned to the old foundation, so it stays locked to the house instead of settling away.

Out past the city center toward West Gardiner, lots open up and so do the options. A 28-by-24 two-bay with a storage loft, or a 36-by-24 three-bay, fits with room to spare, and setbacks rarely drive the design the way they do on the streets around the Common.

Bigger buildings carry more snow, so the roof framing is sized for central Maine loads and the overhead doors are chosen to handle wind on open ground. Every dimension still lands on the 4-foot grid, which keeps material waste low even when the garage spans three full bays.