I'm considering possibly buying an old 80s/90s colonial-style house in my neighbourhood. The problem I have is nearly every house in the area has a front-garage - this is one of my pet peeves and I always feel ruins the appearance of the home, especially as I'm more pro-urban than suburban. However I really like the location of the neighbourhood, it's an affordable area and the community is really nice. Literally the only issue I have is this prevailing front garage issue in nearly every house, since there are very few rear laneways. Here's an example of the kind of house I'm talking about:

My idea is to get a house I can convert the garage into living space and remodel the exterior to re-integrate it into the house design, and make it seem as if the home didn't have a garage. Then I would build a new driveway at the side of the house within the property line to a new detached garage located at the rear. Basically build my own "laneway". I looked up the zoning bylaws and it looks like this is allowed provided I don't go over a certain footprint of the house+garage based on a percentage the lot size.

Just wondering if anyone has ever done something like this and if there are any sort of problems I could expect to run into? I would love to see some examples!