Folks, Thanks for the suggestions--they are good ones. I had never heard about the wireless solution, but perhaps that's a good answer. I did try a motion sensor switch with 180 degree coverage. I'm not sure whether the switch was defective or whether something (like the car) was interfering with it, but coming through the man door would not activate it. In fact, I had to be about halfway into the garage to activate it from the direction of the man door. The line of sight distance from the switch location to the man door is only about 20-25 feet (and the switch's range was claimed to be 40 feet), but as I said, the car was in the garage at the time. JKG

"So, in the current setup or as I have diagramed above still maintaining a single circuit, is this system inadequately grounded?" As a single circuit, it is presumably grounded just fine, as long as there is a proper grounding electrode system back at the main house panel. "I had assumed the circuit being fed consisted of a live, neutral and ground (the twisted bare). " As it is set up at the current time, that is correct, but it wasn't originally wired that way when the actual wire was installed. They didn't DO ground wires back then, and a "bare wire" does not infer that it is a ground wire, just not "ungrounded" (HOT). That is a cable with a concentric neutral. I doubt that either of the insulated wires are "identified" as a neutral (white insulation). "200.2 (A) Insulation. The grounded conductor (neutral), WHERE INSULATED, shall have insulation that is (1) suitable, other than color, for any ungrounded conductor of the same circuit on....." "200 .6 Means of Identifying Grounded Conductors. (A) Sizes 6 AWG or Smaller. An INSULATED grounded conductor (neutral) of 6 AWG or smaller shall be identified by a continuous white or gray outer finish or by three continuous white stripes on other than green insulation along its entire length. Wires that have their outer covering finished to show a white or gray color but have colored tracer...." "Regarding the disconnect... " This depends on the final decision of how you wire it. As it is wired right now, you would only need a standard toggle switch (just like the ones that turn on the lights). If you make it 2 circuits, you may only need 2 standard toggle switches, (just like I cut and pasted them out of your original drawing). You really only need something that looks more industrial if you need to install over current devices. Do you know what the actual wire gauge of the cable going from the house to the garage is? Back then, a common thing to do was to put a dryer receptacle in the garage. (Funny enough, I just noticed that there is a documentary on the outlawing of clothes lines in many parts of the country when the dryer became popular.) In other words, that may have originally been a 30 amp wire and a gas line to make provisions for either type of clothes dryer.

Oh my, that is an intriguing an nice space there. Tool shed is set further back than I thought it would be. That carport roof looks like it wraps around the back of the house too? Delightful. Do you actually want to take that whole thing down? Or that would be the thing to open up into a whole big porch areas perhaps? In the air photos, there's a couple lines on the left side of the pic- are those fences or something that indicates your limits in that direction? Are you willing to remove trees, or are they staying? And what's the dirt movement plans, or does that depend on the plans in general?

If you incorporate the existing garage closest to the house as a porch, then, if you add your two car garage with its door(s) facing the same direction as the door of the house -- not the direction of the existing garage door(s) , you could also extend the right wall of that garage several feet in front of the existing garage and create a shelter/overhang over the existing garage doors that lead to the front porches -- the one created from the existing garage adjacent to the house that could be connected to the smaller portico at the front door of the house. Driving in, you'd not even see the remaining garage door behind the new 2-car garage. You could connect the two garages with a door. If you like the style of your home ... if you want to keep true to the original design of your home, contact an architect to design your porch and garage addition. Putting up just any porch roof or even a smaller portico roof might not turn out as well as it could.