Look at this as a concept. And no, I'm not suggesting a 2nd floor.

Your house isn't really modern, or MCM, so consider another style of garage door.

The garage should look nice, especially since it's so big. You are creating a house attached to a garage instead of the other way around.

I'd try for an overall plan that includes landscape. Adding a low retaining wall as an example, and moving the steps out to the end of the porch as shown above.

Make sure you clearly understand the requirements for exterior finishes.

Great suggestions all around, @PPF. thank you! I really like all of your suggestions and will work on incorporating them into the design.

I love that type of stone. I myself date from the mid-century and my favorite houses in my old neighborhood had that. There were only a couple.

Will you be able to salvage any from the demolition, and reuse it? perhaps along the walk and on the front of the garage? or perhaps on that retaining wall?

The doors shown for house and garage are a little MCM and sleek for a kind of rustic mid-century traditional.

Funny, but I just visited a neighborhood full of brick duplexes and narrow homes, pretty much all the same, with front garages. You can tell when the garage door was last replaced by the style, the ones you show are certainly au courant.

Hi @bpath yes we're hoping to salvage as much of the stone as we can - we also love it and it's plentiful locally. Do you have a door style suggestion that would be more appealing?

@mark bischak - unfortunately with the way it’s constructed, we need to remove the existing garage and reclaim some of the interior space for a mudroom. The garage was scabbed on in the 60s and half of it is taken up by a weird mezzanine up on piers inside. It’s just not the best use of the space and we can’t even fit a modern vehicle inside.

I like you’re clouds :-)

"I am practicing my clouds." Ha! A running inside joke @Swentascic Swenson.

Cah you add the garage to the side of the house and incorporate the current garage into the house?

My ranch home has a single car garage and rather than expand the garage to a double the previous owners added a carport along the side.

My brother did a 4 car garage on his simple ranch, but made it two deep and 2 wide instead of 4 wide

It looks like you are adding a 3 car garage on a modestly sized home. To make it balanced and not look like a giant garage with a home attached may require the services of an architect.

You already understand the pitfalls of not doing things well since the person who added the garage screwed things up.

@ Jennifer hogan - our home is about 3000sf but as I said, we’re limited because of a long narrow lot. We require three indoor bays for our family vehicles and small business so compromising on the size and location aren’t possible. With this in mind I’d like to make the garage and entry architecturally interesting as they’re obviously the first thing anyone is going to see.