CP/QF Crazy: Family with 9 Kids Lives in Garage.....

Large family blogs - regardless of whether they claim the Quiverfull name - are a quirky blend of great ideas mixed pell-mell with horrible ideas.   Amy, who blogs at Raising Arrows, often has sensible tips for organizing spaces - but this old post slides rapidly into "Yeah, that's illegal under housing codes and CPS have a field day with this one."

Posted two days before Christmas in 2005, Amy rhapsodizes about the minimalist simplicity that a family of 11 has achieved by living in a two-car garage to save money while building their dream home which will "hopefully" get finished next year.   The family has three-tiered bunk beds with a crib at the end for all their kids!  They have food storage and cooking equipment on self-constructed shelves!  Their living room furnishings are a couch, a chair and a chest!  It's great because the garage already has a built-in bathroom plus kitchen equipment and laundry hook-ups!  Couldn't we all learn from the simplicity of this family?

No.  This is a horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad idea.  Let's discuss why for anyone who hasn't run through why we don't all live in garages.

First, Amy works hard at making the garage seem livable by claiming the built-in bathroom plus kitchen set-up and laundry room is an  "apartment" which is always described in quotation marks.   That's a bad idea because rental units like apartments often have much stricter housing codes to follow than a "dwelling" so let's call it a "dwelling" because it's not going to make the easier codes for a dwelling. 

I've pulled up the APHA-CDC recommended minimum housing standards from 1986.   Now,  as long as the bathroom has a shower and sink, the garage manages to have the basic facilities and equipment required for habitation. 
Things fall apart in the "Fire and Safety Section".

•  A dwelling has to have two separate exits to ground level in case of fire - which many garages do not have.   
• Bedrooms located below the 4th floor of a building have to have a window large enough to act as an emergency egress.   We don't see that often on garages here in Michigan.  
• All external doors have to have a deadbolt lock or equivalent which is hard to do on a garage door.

In the "Lighting and Ventilation" section,  a dwelling must have windows in all non-bathroom spaces that are equal to at least 8% of the total square footage and the windows must be openable to allow ventilation.  In my experience, garages tend to either have horrible ventilation because of too few windows or are drafty.   The drafty ones might survive the ventilation section, but I think they will get dinged later on.  

I don't know where Amy lives - but dwellings have to have a dedicated source of heat according to Section 7.  This heating unit must be able to keep the entire living space - including the bathroom - at 68 degrees F for families that don't include the elderly, ill, or infants.  Since the family idolized in the post contains a 10 month old infant, the internal temperature must be at 70 degrees F.   In my experience, that's going to be one of the biggest challenges for this family if they want to live in the garage legally, let alone comfortably.  Garages are not generally insulated very well - or at all.  Any heat generating unit is going to bleed heat outward through all three or four external walls much faster than a standard house would.   If the family lives somewhere really warm where homes are not as heavily insulated as they are in the Great Lakes, they might not freeze to death - but the family is going to be in a world of hurt in the summer!    

The first problem my husband and I thought of when making a long list of why people don't live in garages is that the folding doors that let cars in and out of garages are impossible to rodent-proof or insect-proof to the requirements of dwellings.  I grew up in the city where we had more mice brought in the house by senile cats than entered on their own; my husband grew up in the country where people get a few mice in the house every year regardless of the number of cats they have.  We both remember seeing mice in our respective garages.    Truthfully, my bigger concern would be rats.  They have two kids sleeping at the floor level and an infant in a crib - and no one needs to wake up from a rodent bite in the night.     I can't even imagine trying to keep the garage free from ants.  Every crumb of food would need to be swept up and placed in a sealed trash can, the entire floor mopped and everyone vacuumed to remove any crumbs of food from their clothes after every meal.   

At this point, I'm thinking that the family would be better off sleeping in tents, honestly.  At least then they would have food and sleeping areas separated which would make infestations a little easier to control.

Under the "Space" requirements, the minimum square footage allowed is equal to 150 + 100(n-1) where n is the total number of occupants.  The family has 11 people in it so that's a minimum square footage of 1150 feet.  The minimum size of a two car garage is 20' by 20'  which is 400 square feet or nearly 1/3 of the minimum square footage.    For the family to fit, they would need a slightly larger than average four-car garage.

The original post was written in 2010 - but the comment section is revealing as well.  Lots of people wanted an interview with the family who did this.  Amy has had some difficulty getting the family to submit pictures or answers to questions asked by the readers.   I can think of two reasons for that.  The one that sprung to mind right away was being investigated by CPS or DHS for neglect - but Amy swears that the family is now living in a lovely, code-compliant home.  There is one other potential issue: if the family has been living in the garage and the garage is truly code-compliant, they are now  living on a property with two dwellings - which often brings an entire new set of zoning and taxation issues. 

My send off for this post involves sleeping arrangements for the parents.  Amy and her family were all over at this adorable, amazing "apartment" for 11 - but she never mentions where the two parents sleep.    Is the sofa a sleeper sofa?  Are the parents sleeping in a car away from their infant?   Do they have an air mattress?  Where do they fit in this whole mess - and were the kids being adequately supervised at night?