Options for building a new garage

Where in California? Are you rural, or more in town? How big of a garage?

Just throwing those out, your local building codes and city ordinances will have a big effect on what you want to do. Not to mention your resale value. If you're in a neighborhood, you might not want to go with a big metal building, for example. If you're out in the sticks on some property, it won't matter at all. Another fun one, where I live you can't build a "secondary structure" that's more than 50% of the size of the primary structure without the building department coming out and re-evaluating your property for things like sewer access, water run-off, street access, etc. Not saying you can't build one bigger than that, but for me it wasn't worth the hassle in permits.

I actually went through TuffShed to build my garage. But I'm in a neighborhood and in a house I'm not going to be keeping forever, so I didn't want to put up a metal building that would "stick out" as far as the neighborhood goes. And my shop had to be fairly small with my property size, it's only a 24x26. Again, because my entire neighborhood is pretty much single story houses I wasn't worried about putting in a 12" tall shop so I could use a lift (although I will the next time around). The TuffShed professional series garage I bought even had a 7 year warranty on everything, and I didn't have to do anything other than pay them. Not the cheapest way to go, but honestly it wasn't bad compared to local contractors. And it's a well built garage with a warranty, which you don't get out of everybody.

But like I said, I had some constraints as far as size and aesthetics with wanting the garage to blend in and match my house.