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!
Hi, I'm MJ! I'm a DIY kind of girl and this is where I share my projects. I'm taking you along for the ride as I learn how to do woodworking, sew, bake, and renovate! 
I have so much confidence that you will make the coolest, most organized garage I have ever seen! Keep it up, girl!