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Home improvement projects increase the value of your home, while building skills and giving you a hobby to relax with, making something worthwhile with your hands. One of the simpler home improvement projects to tackle this coming summer is building a new garage.

Before building, you need to figure out how big you need the garage to be. Think about not just putting your car in the garage, but what other commonly stored items will be placed there. Checking out floor plans will give you a good estimate to work from.

Once you’ve determined the size of the garage, it’s time to determine what materials you want to use to build it, whether it’s pre-treated or pressure treated wood or a metal frame and siding arrangement. Both metal and timber garages come in pre-fab construction kits, making the selection one that’s driven by your needs.

If you’re in a colder climate, the timber garages will generally have better insulation than the metal ones. If you’re in a climate with a lot of sunlight, the metal garages will hold up better to the extremes in temperatures.

The first step in construction is getting a concrete slab laid down. This will be the anchor point that your garage is built on. Do yourself a favor and hire a good contractor for this – pouring cement is harder than it looks and it’s very easy to ruin your garage with a badly poured slab and the consequent poor drainage that results.

Assembling your garage from a kit is mostly a matter of following the instructions. With some help from your friends, it’s not unreasonable to put up a pre-fab garage or other building inside of a weekend. It’ll take some quality time with hammers and a nailgun, but the end result will raise the value of your property and give you grist for stories along the lines of “Yeah, remember when we put up Bill’s garage…”