Alternatives To A Steel Garage

Alternatives To A Steel Garage

The wife wants me to get a shop built--something that would store:

1. The Corvette in winter.

2. The snowthrower, lawn mower, and other annoying gadgets.

3. The ScopeRoller manufacturing plant.

We have no shortage of land, of course. I'm not keen on spending a lot of money on this, but I do want to make sure that it looks good. (Adding a shop/garage on rural parcels is apparently a big win for value, because lots of people want a shop.)

If we had been a bit smarter about this, we would have built a three car garage. Unfortunately, we started out planning a 2 1/2 car garage, and at the last moment, added another bedroom and bathroom, so that our son would have a place to live if he didn't go to Portland for college. And by then, the general framework of the house had been laid out, so we now have an oversize two car garage.

The contractor that built the house proposed to build a separate two car garage/shop for about $20,000, as a stick built building. That's a bit much. It looks like it a steel garage can be built for about $9000-$10,000--which is at least getting roughly into the right price range. But what alternatives am I missing?

It doesn't need to be insulated. In the depths of winter, sure, I'll run an electric space heater to get it to a tolerable temperature.

I've toyed with the idea of building a sunken structure by excavating a bit more of the hillside, and pouring reinforced concrete walls. This would add substantial insulation--and perhaps the back wall could be literally basalt. A little more excavation would also provide radiation shielding, what with all the lunatics building nuclear weapons out there. (It might end up looking too much like the Bat Cave.)

It needs to be sufficiently conventional that building permits aren't going to be a problem, and sufficiently attractive that my wife doesn't decide to bury me in it.

Any other ideas that I am missing here?