Rethinking the Rear Yard Access

With such a narrow lot, my driveway to the back yard has had to fight with the width of the house and the local building codes to hold it's own. Code requires the house to be 5 ft off the propertly line, and the floorplan I came up with uses 35 ft of width. That's left me with a 10 ft driveway.



But that 10 ft isn't really a full 10 ft of useable space. The chain wall takes up 8 inches of it, and by the time I install posts on both sides for a gate, I wind up with around 8-1/2 ft. This measurement is pretty small compared to other driveways I've seen. This might be okay if the garage door would be straight back from the driveway, but it's not. To get in and out of the garage, you'll need to make a quick S-turn once you get to the backyard (see shaded path on the graphic).



So my mom & I went to the lot this week to measure out this part of the yard and do a test. We measured out where the garage would be and marked it with stakes. Then we measured where the back corner of the house and the width of the driveway would be. I test-drove it with my small Toyota RAV4. We didn't have perfect test conditions because the lot is still all sand, and I can't drive too close to the chain wall. (The sand is too soft & I started to get stuck!) That, and it's hard to see the corners you have to avoid from inside the car. You'd really need full-height walls (or taller stakes) to show you where the borders are.



Getting in was no problem. I'd hate to have to do that all the time with a huge vehicle, but it would probably still work. When trying to back out, I thought I might be able to do a 3-point turn and come out forward instead of backing out, but it's too tight. I didn't actually do a test back out because of the difficulty in seeing the boundaries and the danger of getting stuck in the sand.



But the test showed me that I needed to make some adjustments. I'm shortening the depth of the garage by 18 inches and widening it by 2 ft. I'm also shaving 6 inches off the width of the house and adding it to the driveway. These aren't major changes (I don't have room to make major ones), but I think I'll be happy that I made these minor ones!