your neighbour has a garage and he's gonna bitch that you want one for yourself? Are you sacrificing the size of the playroom or it's existence?
Worth considering what are the odds that they'll ban the construction of new garages in NDG? I wouldn't say it's 0 when you consider what has happened in other boroughs.
I'd build the garage maybe use it or not, but cut 3feet of grass in the front on my side to create enough space to park while maintaining the right of way.
it's more complicated than that, we've been in discussion for weeks now over our respective legal rights.
We share a driveway, 50/50. Driveway is perpendicular to street. We both have garages that are parallel to the street and which are located under the house in the basement. To access the garage and make the necessary turns, you need to step on the neighbor's portion of the driveway. There is a reciprocal "right of way" which entitles either party to step on the other party's portion of the driveway to access their garages. The consequence of this is that the driveway is NOT a legal parking space. We have legal opinions stating that fact from both my and their notaries.
The garages, in their current state, are too small to fit a modern car. Garage door is 7.5" by 8".
So, we're doing our project and we need to have a legitimate parking space. In practical terms, it just seems like we're creating a big mess out of nothing, but there's no way we are going ahead with the project if we can get fcked down the road when they sell their house and the new neighbor tells us we can't park in the driveway and we've at that point, potentially decided to get rid of the garage. We're in this place for the next 20 years and we need to consider all the bad shit that could happen in that time period.
So the options to fix the issue are:
1) We + neighbor park in the driveway. Basically, we remove the right of way and agree not to build on that piece of land. The consequence for the neighbor is that they lose their garage because we no longer accept them to drive on our property to access it (because our car will be legally parked there!). But is the garage really lost when it's not really usable in its current state? The consequence is the same for us, we lose our (non-functional) garage but we have livable space where the garage used to be.
1) with a twist We agree to removing the right of way, but we build a garage nonetheless outside of the driveway's area. In this case, we have two legal parking spots, one in the garage, one in the driveway. The garage is built at the expense of livable space which would likely be used for a common area living room, office space, etc.
2) We + neighbor disagree on modifying the right of way, things get ugly and we both need to enforce our legal rights. We have no choice but to build a garage if we want a legal parking space. In this case, we give up livable space for that garage. Maybe some time down the road when the neighbor sell their house and a new guy comes in, we reset relationships and we get "illegal" access to the driveway as a 2nd parking spot.
We are heading down path 1) at the moment, but I'm curious as to what MR thinks of 1) with a twist. Garage vs. livable space...