The Carl’s Place DIY kit is the entry point for anyone building a garage bay without hiring anyone. The base kit runs $999.95, and it’s worth being precise about what that actually buys, since it’s easy to assume wrong: the impact screen (your choice of four tiers), the black nylon enclosure fabric for the sides and top, steel corner fittings, ball bungees, zip ties, and a bottom cable that keeps the screen under tension. What it does not include is the frame itself, the tubing that the fabric and screen actually hang on. Carl’s Place ships a cut list and assembly instructions, but the pipe comes from a hardware store or from Carl’s own Pipe Framing Kit add-on, priced separately. Stack that add-on plus foam corner protectors and 8-inch curtain extensions to seal light gaps on top of the base kit, and the finished cost lands near $1,650.

An empty garage bay with metal walls and a bare concrete floor, ready for a build — A blank garage bay before the build starts. Most standard one-car and two-car footprints adjust to fit an EMT-conduit frame kit without structural changes. *Kevin Chuang via Pexels. Pexels License.*

That base price covers a real choice, not just one generic screen. Carl’s Place offers four impact screen tiers inside the kit. Standard is the budget option with a looser weave, built for casual hitting rather than fine ball-flight detail. Preferred steps up to a silicone-reinforced, tighter weave and is generally the best value of the four for a serious home bay. Premium adds tri-layer construction for noise dampening, worth the upgrade if the garage shares a wall with living space. High-Contrast Gray Premium is the same tri-layer build tuned for rooms with ambient light the projector has to compete against, useful for anyone not planning to fully black out the bay. All four ship with the same cabled, no-border bottom that lets the projected image run to the floor without a visible seam.

A crew stretching a new fabric skin over a steel-tubed tent frame — Frame first, fabric second. Whether it's a conduit frame kit or a larger tension structure, the screen and surround fabric are a separate material cost layered onto the frame. *NAVFAC (Naval Facilities Engineering Command) via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.*

Assembly is genuinely solo-friendly, though the material is worth naming correctly since it gets called PVC almost everywhere online, including in earlier versions of this guide. The actual pipe Carl’s Place specifies is 1-inch EMT, electrical metallic tubing, a thin-wall steel conduit, not plastic PVC pipe. It’s stiffer and holds a truer frame shape under the tension of a stretched impact screen than PVC would, which is part of why the company moved to it. Carl’s Place’s own estimate is that most solo builders put the bare frame together in just over an hour with basic hand tools, no specialized skills needed for a standard bay size. That number is for the frame alone. Add fitting the screen, tensioning the bottom cable, mounting foam corners, and sealing light gaps with the curtain extensions, and a full weekend is the realistic timeline for a first build.

A garage mid-project with hand tools and equipment laid out — The kind of weekend-project mess a solo build actually looks like. Basic hand tools cover the entire assembly, no power tools or specialized skills required. *Point3D Commercial Imaging Ltd. via Unsplash. Unsplash License.*

Sizing the enclosure to your bay

Carl’s Place builds most of these to order rather than off a fixed size chart. The custom range runs from a minimum of 95.7 inches tall by 95.4 inches wide up to a maximum of 123.7 inches tall by 162.4 inches wide, measured on the viewable screen. A few common configurations show the real tradeoff: an 8-by-8-foot enclosure gives an 88.6-by-88.6-inch viewable screen in a square 1:1 ratio, while a 7.7-by-13-foot enclosure stretches to an 85.5-by-151.9-inch viewable area in 16:9, a better match for how most simulator software actually frames a course on screen. Bigger isn’t automatically better: a wider screen needs a projector with the throw ratio and brightness to fill it evenly edge to edge, so size the enclosure and the projector together rather than picking one first and hoping the other cooperates.

Space around the frame matters as much as the frame’s own footprint. Carl’s Place recommends 2 to 3 inches of buffer above and on each side of the frame, and, more importantly, 12 to 16 inches of clearance behind the impact screen itself. That gap isn’t spare headroom, it exists because a ball or club making contact with anything behind the screen, drywall, shelving, a parked car, damages the screen material over repeated hits. Measure that depth in the actual garage before ordering, not after the kit arrives.

One line item the kit doesn’t include: floor protection. Golf simulator turf flooring under and around the hitting mat protects a garage floor from divots, dropped clubs, and rolling balls, and it’s a lot cheaper to add now than to patch concrete or replace flooring later.

The exterior of an industrial garage door beside a concrete wall — The garage this all goes behind. A closed door is what actually protects the finished bay, and the floor underneath it, from weather and stray traffic. *Tomáš Hustoles via Burst by Shopify. Burst License.*

What to budget beyond the sticker price

Assembly support and lead time round out what the base kit doesn’t advertise up front. Carl’s Place builds these made to order, with roughly 10 business days between order and ship, and most orders ship free. Phone and email support are available weekdays for anyone stuck mid-build. None of that changes the core math this guide opened with: $999.95 buys the enclosure fabric and a screen you choose from four tiers, the frame material and any finishing add-ons are separate line items on top, and a realistic finished budget with a pipe kit, foam corners, and curtain extensions lands close to the $1,650 figure in the title, not the $999.95 alone.