I hate side entry garages, so changing to front entry would be a huge advantage for me.

You have pictures of your current home? Are you just trying to change your curb appeal and do you have neighbors living next door

We’re building a new house and not trying to change be curb appeal. Excavation has not started so I only have plans. I have searched all over google and can’t figure out how much width I need to turn into and out of driveway if it’s side facing. We have neighbors on both sides.

Vigil—I’m looking for a dimension for the part that I circled in red. I don’t see that on the drawing.

I think the closest thing you have to go on to compare to Virgil's diagram is the 25' measurement on your drawing with 2'6" taken away for 22'6" "width" in that area.

Might be a little tight - but it looks doable to me! And the extra parking, and turnaround would be nice. (and a nice place to play some hoops if that is your thing...)

The red circled arrow is 20 feet in the drawing from Virgil. I’m estimating your measurement to be about 22.5 feet. Since in your drawing it is to the property line and it is about half closer than the 5’ where the drive begins

Our builder always tries to get 30 feet in the land of oversized vehicles. You can get by with 25 feet comfortably with smaller cars and good drivers. Our neighbor had like 24 feet and had to do multi point turns with a Range Rover.

The 2 feet 6 that is not driveway - what is that? If it is level ground that will be grass or mulch, it kind of counts. If it has to be taller vegetation, then it doesn't.

Who did this to you?

These are "Minimum Driveway Standards". I have never designed to dimensions this small. If you have anyone in your family learning to drive in the future, double the dimensions.

It looks tight to me, especially making the turn into the first garage space. Our neighbors a few houses down built a new home a few years ago and insisted on a side entry garage but also insisted on maximizing their house width per side setbacks. It's a joke watching them try and get in and out of their garage. A front load would have been so much easier.

Now, full disclosure we screwed up our driveway too. Ours is a front load, but we didn't do the 'Minimum Taper' in Virgil's drawing above...or maybe we did do the minimum but it's not enough. This where we went a bit rogue from our architect's drawings (he was wise, us not so much). So now we have this stupid sharp curve that half the time I can't turn my car sharp enough to stay on the driveway and end up hitting yard and the other half, I'm lucky. So we'll be adding additional concrete in that corner to fix our stupidity. My desire for a cute, curving driveway was quickly squashed by a dose in practical reality!

It looks tight to me, and I drive a mini! (Now, if you have a Toyota you can make anything work... best turning radus ever.)

Any chance the lot is already flat enough that you can try it? When I reworked a gravel driveway for a prior house, I had a friend come over with his huge truck and made him drive it from the street to the carport 10x (frontways, backways, and every which way). We then added 2' on each side of the widest tire marks and spread the gravel. It worked perfectly. (Full disclosure: I still had a friend back out wrong and take out a tree... but I blame his driving skills--not the driveway!)

What size vehicles do you have or anticipate having in the future? A Mini Cooper is not the same as a Dodge Ram dually with extended cab and bed...

and do you have snowbanks to deal with? your neighbor really doesnt want your snow on his property.

as much as i dislike a garage being a main feature of the front of the house, i also dislike too much hard surface for rain to run off of.

as your garage doesnt protrude ahead of the rest of the house, i'd do a front load and have a nice side yard.

Mark Bischak...that was Virgil's guideline which was posted...it was not the ops design.

Thank you guys for all your advice. I have 2 SUVs so I agree it’s going to be tight. I don’t want to be making multiple turns to RT in and out. So I think front facing seems to be the most practical!
Thanks again!

Make the room. This is something that will drive you nuts day in and day out if you don't fix it! Get a pretty garage door.

Does the person that designed your house drive a car?

I hate front facing driveways....nobody wants the garage door in the front of the house...

fwiw, I would have no problem with that driveway...just pull forward and back in...

A side facing driveway as shown allows you to enter and leave by driving forward...if that's important!

I know this looks very amateurish (I just edited your photo on my iPad using the built-in photo editor for time’s sake), but if you’re going to keep the plan more or less as it is, I’ve tweaked a few things. Most notably absent from my sketch is the grass strip within the driveway boundaries: with the way it was, I’m pretty sure you’d have been driving ON grass where the semi-circular driveway meets the main driveway. BTW: you can disregard the text and object in blue—unless you know what it is!

If the garage is only 21'6" square (which is how I'm reading the drawing), the OP won't be parking any large vehicles in there anyway. Our garage is 22' x 22', and it is a tight squeeze for a minivan and a Jeep Grand Cherokee.

I have a single car driveway (I haven’t measured the width) but I drive a SUV and its fine to get down. At the end of the driveway I have a HUGE pad for the side entry garage. You need this to back up and turn your car around. Your lot size is not large enough for a side entry garage and perhaps you should consider entering from the rear of the house if you cannot have a front load driveway per code. Also I am not a fan of the circle drive - way too much asphalt or concrete on such a small front yard.