80x120 Steel Auto Repair Shop

This page is ordered around height and clearance, because at 80x120 the 22-foot eave limits a auto repair shop sooner than the plan does.

The footprint holds 20 service bays — 5 across by 4 deep — and the remaining 8 feet is marginal: the leftover cannot hold a customer zone, so the counter has to take width from a bay instead.

Commitment first: 73% of the 9,600 square feet goes to service bays at 350 square feet each, and 1,840 square feet survives as edge strip. A footprint is worth its own decision when that split lands where the work does. Fire separation, egress and occupancy are determined for the specific building and can reshape this plan entirely.

Across a 80-foot span carried 120 feet deep, Service work is organized around service bays before anything else. This footprint gives up a real share of its length to the front of house, so the bay count is deliberately lower than the area implies. The trade buys a shop customers can wait in. Diagnostic and electrical work needs a different position than heavy mechanical work, and one bay rarely serves both well. The approach apron carries as much of the operation as the floor does, and a plan that ignores it loses a bay to queuing.

This footprint is planned as customer-facing shop with a front service zone. Vehicle movement is pushed to one side or to the rear so that the customer approach never crosses a bay mouth. That separation is the organising decision of the plan. across a 80-foot span carried 120 feet deep that judgement is a different one than at an adjacent footprint.

Across a 80-foot span the 4:12 pitch adds 13.3 feet between eave and ridge. The centreline measures 35.3 feet; anything parked or stacked near a wall lives with the 22-foot eave. Circulation width is the first thing surrendered under pressure and the first thing missed afterwards.

Across a 80-foot span carried 120 feet deep, Work zones are conventional in depth, but they start further back. Everything technical is set behind the front block, which also insulates the waiting area from noise.

Ventilation across 9,600 square feet at this height: running engines and finishing work mean exhaust extraction and general air movement are planned, not improvised.

Across a 80-foot span carried 120 feet deep, The floor divides between work, parts and the customer side. The office is not a corner here — it is a zone with a counter, seating and a view of the approach, and it takes floor that would otherwise hold a bay. Parts sit behind the counter block rather than on an outer wall, which shortens the walk from the counter and lengthens it from the far bay. Vehicles waiting on parts age the plan faster than the work itself; storage for them is either planned or improvised on the apron.

Treating the last 8 feet as a room is the recurring planning error at 80x120: the leftover cannot hold a customer zone, so the counter has to take width from a bay instead. The mezzanine that is added afterwards is the change order that reprices the frame.

Spare width is the more valuable of the two leftovers here: a continuous 10-foot strip beats the same area stranded at the end of the run, because it touches every position along the way. Storage expands until it meets a wall, so give it a wall on purpose.

Vehicle movement is pushed to one side or to the rear so that the customer approach never crosses a bay mouth. That separation is the organising decision of the plan. across a 80-foot span carried 120 feet deep that judgement is a different one than at an adjacent footprint. That movement pattern, not the 9,600-square-foot total, is what decides whether the leftover 8 feet is useful here.

The 80-foot gable can carry 5 openings, one per service bay, with 10 feet of wall left for piers between and beside them — the arrangement that keeps each position independently reachable. Two feet of spare width reads as nothing on a plan and as a great deal when a machine is being turned.

With 9,600 square feet arranged 80 wide by 120 long, which is what fixes the number of service bays available, The front block usually rules out a through route, because one gable is occupied by the customer zone rather than by a door.

At 24-foot nominal bays the structure works with the layout instead of against it: one service bay per bay line, walls free of awkward half-positions. Judge the plan by what has to happen on the worst day of the year, not on an average one.

Depth here creates a hierarchy: 4 rows means front positions get used and rear positions get filled. Deciding which is which up front is what keeps 80x120 workable. Rows that cannot be entered independently end up used as one long space.

Expansion adds bays to the rear, leaving the front block untouched, which is why the customer zone is worth siting at the end that will not be extended.

The customer route is the point of the layout: park, enter, wait and leave without ever standing on the working floor.

Configured as customer-facing shop with a front service zone, 80x120 is judged on whether the 20 service bays it holds match the operation, and on whether the 10 feet of spare width leaves the route this mode depends on.

• Does the work need racking or work zones on both sides with a full vehicle lane down the middle, or does it need a second lane that this 80-foot span cannot give?
• Is the 120-foot length being bought for depth, or for the repeated bays — a long repeating bay sequence, so segment boundaries are set by bay lines rather than by walls?
• How many bays need their own door for the shop to run at the pace you plan?
• Does the eave height clear a vehicle at full lift travel, not just at ride height?

• 50x80 moves the count from 20 to 6 service bays (3 across by 2 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.
• 40x100 moves the count from 20 to 9 service bays (3 across by 3 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.
• 60x80 moves the count from 20 to 3 service bays (3 across by 1 deep), which is the reason to choose between them.

Because this footprint is planned as customer-facing shop with a front service zone, the useful next reads are different from the ones a differently shaped auto repair shop suggests: shop front office layout, customer waiting area planning, service shop reception.

Quantities, not prices, are publishable here: roof cladding runs 10,119 square feet — 5% above the 9,600-square-foot floor at a 4:12 pitch — with 177.8 cubic yards of nominal slab beneath it. The plan is only as good as the route into it, which is a site question rather than a building one.

Cost per useful position is the comparison that matters: 480 square feet of building per service bay. Some of the floor is paid for as working slack. Whoever operates the building daily should read the plan before it is frozen, because they know where the pinch points are.

• the number of bay openings
• eave height driven by lift travel
• exhaust extraction and air distribution
• separating a customer area from the working floor