by Carole Hill

Created on: January 05, 2009

The answer seems so easy to me. To my way of thinking, an attached garage is a huge advantage to a house; not only in design, but for practical reasons as well.

I personally have never seen an attached garage that does not have a door or some sort of entry into the home. For this reason alone, an attached garage provides easy access to the living quarters of the house. This is an especially convenient feature when the weather is bad, as you don't have to worry about dropping packages or if it is raining, you don't have to search for that umbrella, or most importantly, you don't have to worry about slipping or falling on wet, dirty ground and injuring yourself.

The safety factors with an attached garage design are many. For one thing, you don't have to walk any distance out of doors. By this I mean you don't have to leave the detached garage and walk any distance to get to your house. You don't have to walk through your yard, narrow walkways, or even brush through gardens that might be lined with pinchy rose bushes.

There is even more reason to feel safer when driving into an attached garage at night, because you can simply close the garage door from inside and you are in your home, safe and sound. While we're discussing the dangers of pulling into the garage at night, there's always the inherent fear of prowlers and we can't leave out the dog that, in some cases, wants to protect his family, and if you are walking from a detached garage to your home, there's a potential danger of running into the proverbial watchdog that lends itself to more unnecessary dangers

These advantages I have just discussed seem sufficient enough to substantiate my reason for choosing the attached garage as opposed to the detached garage; but let us now take a look at basic esthetics of an attached garage. It seems natural to give a "thumbs up" vote to a home that is designed with the garage attached to the living quarters.

The basic look of the home flows better when the architectural design includes house and garage in one structure. Anyone can drive down the street and compare homes and pick their favorites, but for me, if I were to drive down a street and make random selections as to which homes I thought had the best "curb appeal", I would select homes that are designed in one flowing construction. I'm not a real estate expert, but I should think that the concept of one complete flowing construction would add more value to a home's selling price.

So in conclusion, we have discussed several advantages for leaning towards the "attached garage" design. There is convenience, relief from subjecting one's self to weather conditions, less worry of personal injuries, less walking, better access to get inside the house, general safety, and we must include how much better a house looks in terms of basic esthetics.

I'm assuming this debate omits commercial buildings and retail stores, as that would be a whole other topic, in my opinion, but in the case of residential housing, I am definitely attached to the attached garage design.

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