So I warned you in yesterday’s post that I didn’t have any spectacular HEY LOOK HOW ORGANIZED MY GARAGE IS pictures, and this post is no different.  This project was purely about performance and not about making things pretty.  But as far as I’m concerned, sometimes those are the best projects! Ever since we have moved into this house every time we need a tool- a screwdriver, hammer, nails, level, etc we had to go digging through 3 or 4 boxes to find the right tool.  Which really meant that we didn’t hang any pictures, fix any small details etc unless we had enough time to go searching for our tools.

So I was bound and determined to get some sort of organization going on in the garage so that we would better be able to utilize the space! I really liked having our pegboard in the last house, already owned most of the baskets, hooks etc, that we would need to hang our tools, so I just needed the empty wall and a sheet of pegboard.  It turns out a giant sheet of peg board isn’t that expensive (ours was just under$18 dollars at Home Depot) and I already owned the scrap wood we would need to mount it.  So this whole project cost me about 18 dollars and saves me TONS of time.

The front wall of our garage was the perfect space for a pegboard. (please ignore the junk–including a pot that doesn’t belong in the garage) We also intend to build a rolling workbench that will fit underneath this and still allow us to park a car in the garage.  And since the workbench will be on casters, we won’t be permanently losing any square footage in the garage. (We are never planning on selling this house, but I do realize some people–especially in Texas– drive longer vehicles than the husband and I do, so I wouldn’t want to put anything too permanent that would prevent a truck or large SUV from parking in the garage.)

For pegboard to work it needs to sit a little ways out from the wall (so that when you put a hook in, it has somewhere to go!).  So our first step was to locate the studs to hang our top board.  I used scrap cutoffs from 8′ plywood boards from a previous project, but you could easily use pine 1x2s if you don’t have a large scrap woodpile your husband would like you to use up rather than to expand. So first up was marking the studs with a stud finder or in this case, my husband:

From there we held our top board along the wall (lined up with our top left corner which you barely see marked to the top left of my husband’s elbow) and marked where the studs would hit our board.  Because the wood we are using is so narrow, it is a good idea to pre-drill your screw holes so that you don’t splinter the wood.

We put a screw on every stud- so had 6 in each our top and bottom boards.  Since this took both my husband and me on step stools with a level and the drill, I didn’t get in process pictures, but I believe in your imaginations–you can picture it.  We did hold the level up in several places just to ensure our board was level since this is how we would secure the whole piece of pegboard and didn’t want it hanging catty-wompus on the wall.  We repeated the process with the bottom board and then for good measure hung three vertical pieces to secure the pegboard to.  You’ll notice these aren’t evenly spaced (or maybe you won’t, but I’ll explain anyway).  We hung each one onto a stud just to give some extra security for this guy.  We haven’t hung many heavy things on our pegboard in the past, but we want to make sure that if we do decide to hang a few tools or heavier items the pegboard won’t come falling out of the wall.  And let me tell you… this guy is up there for good.

The last step was cutting out a hole for the electrical outlet.  (It was missing its cover and I still haven’t gone to the store to get one, but I wanted to cut out hole for it anyway).  This was simply a matter of holding the board up, looking through the holes to mark the outlet and cutting it out with a jigsaw, but since I’m a bad blogger I didn’t get pictures of this step.

A few more screws into the board and this guy was ready to go!

And about an hour later– I had 2 more boxes unloaded and out for display! And since we got these things hung up, we have hung pictures in the house, fixed an AC duct cover and I am going to credit a lot of that to being able to use our tools easily!

Next up on our to do list is to build the workbench/wood storage. And we have a mostly free Valentine’s weekend coming up… so guess what I asked for?! Its a good thing my husband loves me and my project driven life!

Are you guys ready for the most amazing after picture I will ever post on this blog?! (Somehow I always feel the need for a sarcasm font… seriously- like italics but cooler).   Our new house is amazing, it has great storage, a better layout for us, a MONSTROUSLY huge master bedroom, etc etc.  What it doesn’t have? A better garage.

The last house had some pretty good already built in storage in the garage including a pegboard workbench, and two closets: one with a door and one without.  As well as some overhead wire storage the previous homeowners had installed.  This house has absolutely nothing for storage in the garage.  My theory is that the house has a lot of other storage-including a large walk-in floored attic space, so if you don’t use your garage for anything but cars, there is plenty of space to store extra stuff. I on the other hand, use my garage for LOTS AND LOTS OF TOOLS!! So I needed some added function in the garage.

It is a two car garage- barely. But I have no illusions about ever getting two cars in our garage. I’ll be happy at this point to be able to get one in there. Because here is the “after we unpacked/picked up the garage” picture.

That’s no joke.  This is after we had assembled our shelves, unpacked most of the boxes and taken the things out of there that obviously didn’t belong.  (Any boxes we didn’t have labeled well or didn’t have a spot for landed in the garage in a “we’ll deal with that later pile”).  I would have taken a picture but really it was just a wall of boxes and crap.  I feel like this picture is traumatic enough for your eyes.

Anyway, this area is still obviously not usable in this state.  And at this point every time we need a screwdriver, hammer, pliers, etc we have to rummage through the remaining 10ish boxes to figure out where it is.  Obviously we have excellent labeling skills. Honestly I’m just proud of us getting everything into boxes during this move because I was on the couch in a first trimester exhaustion and nausea induced haze. #myhusbandisatrooper

So our plans for the garage are this:

• Move everything that doesn’t belong in the garage to it’s proper place (in our last house we stored a lot of decor/extra things in the garage because it was our only storage, but here we have the better attic, so I’m wanting to organize and move all non-garage related items up there)
• Get rid of the trash and extra items that we don’t need in here
• Construct a pegboard to hang all our smaller tool items like hammers, screw drivers, etc in an easy to reach manner.  (I’m sort of cheating on this one since we actually did this last weekend and I’ll be posting about it tomorrow)
• Build a workbench/wood storage unit that will fit along the back wall to house the rest of the items that are currently in those boxes and give us a space to work.  I’ve pinned a bunch of neat ideas on my Garage and Woodworking Boards if you are curious and want to go see!
• Hang the other two bikes from the ceiling
• Re-organize the shelves to maximize usability

I don’t need my garage to be a pretty space, but I definitely want it to be useful and right now it is not serving any of its purposes!