How our data works

Where builds come from

Every setup profile is created by a signed-in account holder describing their own garage, workshop or hobby space. We do not scrape forums, Reddit, Houzz, Instagram, YouTube or any other site. We do not import listings. We do not generate builds to fill categories.

This means the collection grows slowly and honestly. Where a category has no builds in it yet, the page says so rather than showing something borrowed.

What “owner-reported” means

Dimensions, costs, dates and product details are entered by the owner. We do not visit the space, measure it, or ask for invoices. Figures are validated for plausibility — a 400-foot-wide garage or a $50 million budget is rejected — but a plausible wrong number will pass.

We therefore never describe any figure on this site as verified. Where you see a cost, it is what someone told us they paid.

Reported versus estimated

Each cost line carries a flag for whether it is what the owner actually paid or their own estimate. Estimated lines are labelled as such on the setup profile and are included in aggregates, because excluding them would distort the picture more than including them.

How cost aggregates are calculated

The cost discovery page aggregates only cost lines that meet all of these conditions:

• The build is published.
• The build is not sample content.
• The owner set their budget visibility to “itemised”.
• The individual line is marked public.

For each category we publish the count of contributing builds, the minimum, the median and the maximum. Where fewer than five builds have reported a category, the page labels the sample as too small to draw a conclusion from. We do not publish a single “average garage renovation cost” figure, because a national average computed from a small, self-selected sample would be actively misleading.

These numbers are not a market rate, a quote, or a benchmark. Region, year, scope and how much work the owner did themselves move them enormously.

Products and links

A product appears in the catalogue only after an owner links it to their build. Catalogue entries created by contributors are held for review before they appear on public product pages; they show on the contributor’s own build immediately.

We do not publish product prices or stock availability, because we cannot keep them accurate. Where a price appears, it is what a specific owner reported paying at the time, and it is labelled that way.

Outbound merchant links are routed through a single redirect on our own domain, which re-validates the destination at click time. Commercial links carry rel="nofollow sponsored". See the affiliate disclosure for the current commercial position, which is that no link on this site earns a commission today.

Photographs

Contributors upload their own photographs and explicitly confirm at upload time that they own them or have permission to publish them. Images are re-encoded in the browser before upload, which removes EXIF metadata including GPS coordinates, and are resized so a phone photo does not carry a house location or a 12 MB payload.

Uploaded images land in a private bucket in a “not published” state. Nothing is publicly reachable until the owner explicitly includes it on a published build, and public pages are served short-lived signed URLs rather than permanent public links. Moderators can remove an image, and an owner cannot reverse that.

Location

There is no field anywhere in this product for a street address. Contributors choose one of three levels of precision: nothing at all, region or state only (the default), or city and region. That choice is enforced in the database view that public pages read from, not merely hidden in the interface.

Privacy of costs

A build owner picks one of four budget visibilities: exact total, total plus itemised breakdown, a broad band only, or nothing. Private amounts are not sent to the browser at all — the public data view omits them — so they cannot be recovered by inspecting the page or querying the public API.

Sample content

In development and preview environments we sometimes load clearly-labelled fixture builds so the interface can be reviewed with realistic data. Fixtures:

• Carry a visible “sample content” banner on every page they appear on.
• Are excluded from the sitemap and marked noindex.
• Are excluded from every community statistic and every cost aggregate.
• Are not attributed to invented people.
• Are disabled entirely on the production domain.

Concept garages

Four garages on this site are concepts. They exist because a community with nothing published yet still has to show what a setup page holds, and a wireframe does not. They are:

• Labelled “Concept garage” wherever they appear.
• Owned by nobody. There is no member, no name and no profile behind them.
• Illustrated with images generated with AI, commissioned for this site. Nothing is scraped, borrowed or taken from another garage, thread or listing.
• Made up, as to their numbers. The dimensions, budgets and product lists show the shape of a real entry; they are not measurements anybody took or prices anybody paid, and they are never counted in any statistic, cost aggregate or search result.

This is stated here, in one place, rather than repeated on every card. A published member setup is the opposite of all of the above: a real garage, owned, measured and priced by the person who built it.

Moderation

Anyone signed in can report a build, a photograph, a product or a question. Reports are rate-limited and recorded with the reporter’s account. Moderators can hide questions, reject images and reject builds; a moderator’s rejection cannot be undone by the owner.

See the community guidelines for what gets removed.

What we will change, and how you will know

If the way we aggregate costs changes, or a commercial relationship starts affecting what you see, this page and the affiliate disclosure get updated first. We would rather lose a placement than quietly change what a number means.