Organizing Our Garage

Hey there! Below was our original garage organization, but we’ve since redone it in a MUCH better way. We have new permanent solutions in there and you should check out the final product!

One of the things we were looking for when buying a house was a man cave/second living space. We ended up choosing a gorgeous view of the lake instead of this space, so I’m turning our garage into a functional work/storage/man space. I spent some time last weekend finally getting a chance to start organizing our garage.

The garage is great. It came with painted floors and a big piece of built-in storage hanging from the ceiling. We were also fortunate enough that they left us a big, sturdy shop table for doing work on, as well as two bookshelves for storage. I built a tiny shop table that fit in nice in the corner of the porch at the condo, but this thing puts that to shame. The only problem is that, since it’s so big, it stuck out too far into the garage door opening and we couldn’t really fit both our cars in the garage. So, since Morgan has a short car, I decided to switch the table and the shelves around to give us more room to park.

Once I got them in place, I unpacked all of our boxes that I had labeled for the garage and put them in good places on the shelves. I also set up the shelving unit that I had installed at the condo porch closet. I moved this over to the door where we are now going to use it for bulk storage items (#CostcoGoals). We’ve always wanted to buy more things in bulk but never had the space until now.

I raided my dad’s shed this past weekend after he moved and took a bunch of tools, like the lawn mower and a bunch of hand tools and put them in the exposed beams in the corner of the garage, but I need to figure out a long term solution.

Finally, I arranged all of our camping gear and holiday decorations in the overhead storage. I would love to get once-a-year items (like Christmas decorations) up to the attic, but there aren’t many floorboards laid down and the duct work from the AC is blocking access to a lot of it. It will be a winter project for me to get up there and lay down floors for storage for infrequently used things.

That’s it for now. The garage will be a work in progress because I still need to figure out a way to store our bikes and the yard tools I got from my dad (and all the ones I’ll get in the future!). Here’s looking at you, Lowe’s.

But at least now we can fit both of our cars in the garage… once I can figure out how to program a garage door opener…