Garage Makeover Plans

Guess who has a super awesome husband who fixed their broken computer! :)

It's running pretty slowly, but it works! Makes me so happy, and fingers crossed it will limp along for another 6 months until I'm ready to buy a new computer. Sadly my Jamaica pictures didn't get backed up for some reason, although I still have them on my SD cards, just lost all of the time going through them and deleting duds so I can post a reasonable amount. So instead, I'm going to jump right into posting about our garage makeover plans!

I'm pretty excited about this next project too. Surprisingly, in fact. I mean, it's just a garage, how exciting can it be? But it's going to be so refreshing to not see unorganized piles of tools everywhere, and it means after we finish, I can finally start building all of the furniture I've been eying on Ana White's site!

This past weekend we didn't get much done, with my husband being laid up with a bum ankle. But that just meant I had lots of time to finalize our garage plans, make the 'to get' list, lay out the schedule (WBS to any project management nerds out there :) ) and go on an online shopping spree for the majority of what we need. It's looking like it will take us about 4 weeks to get everything done...yes, I know I'll be eating my words later, since house projects always take longer than expected. But I gotta start with a plan before it can go off track, haha! We're also looking at a budget of about $1500 + lumber for the workbenches, which actually is pretty good considering how much we're cramming in there.

But enough talk, let's see the plans! First, a look at the general floor plan, to see what we've got to work with:

Which currently looks like this. Complete chaos.

And the general plans. Which might be hard to read, although you can probably click on the image to see it larger.

Because you guys know I love doing 2D mock ups of room design plans, here's a better breakdown of the walls of the main part of the garage. First, the left side wall:

We're going to paint the walls Ben Moore's Shaker Gray, the same color as our guest bedroom. Not only do we both love the color, but it will hide dirt and grime a lot better than the current beige walls, and make things look nice and polished, for a garage at least. From left to right we've got slatwall to hang our tennis rackets, badminton set, basketball and other random outdoor toys and sports equipment. Then we have a slatted cubby on casters for our firewood storage, which we'll make out of 2x4s. It's slatted to make sure there's plenty of air flow for wood to dry, and we'll store supplies for our fire pit, like citronella candles and fire starters, on top of it.

Then we have a place between the two windows (which will get sheer window treatments, similar to the ones I made for our downstairs bathroom reno) for our table saw and miter saw. Eventually we're planning to build a table to mount the miter saw at the same height as the table saw, but that will probably happen down the road--it's on my husband's list to design the plans for the saw table. Above the saw area we'll have another section of slatwall for more hanging storage. Under the second window we'll store our sawhorses and shop-vac, and there will be a handy whiteboard on the other side of the window, next to the workbench.

The back wall:

The back wall will feature two workbenches that we're going to custom build to fill the space on the walls on either side of our door to the house. The left side workbench will have a shelf under the length of the bench, with DIY rolling bins on the floor under the shelf. Above the workbench we plan to hang the old cabinets that we took out of our kitchen the first day we owned our house, with slatwall under the cabinets. We'll also have LED under cabinet lighting and the all-important paper towel holder, since I plan to set up my paint supply station on this side.

The right side workbench will have two rolling cabinets under it, with space for two bar stools. Above the workbench we will have a 4x8 section of pegboard for tons of small tool storage. We are also going to have a florescent light fixture above this half of the workbench wall (which is a compromise--I wanted to pay an electrician to come in and put in a permanent fixture, but hubs didn't like the fixture I was in love with. We never seem to agree on lighting! So I'm getting my way with new semi-DIY light fixtures for the main overhead lighting, but he gets his ugly florescent fixture here. At least I'm planning to treat it with high heat ORB spray paint, to make it look slightly less awful, even though it will still be a florescent fixture.).

And the last wall I mocked up, the right side:

We're planning on building a narrow shelf on this wall, above the workbench, to hold all of our many boxes of nails and screws. To the right of the workbench we have a lumber storage area, with 4x8 plywood sheets up against the wall, and a rolling bin in front of that to store our scrap lumber upright. Whenever we need to get to the plywood, we can just roll the scrap wood bin out of the way, but this is a good use of wall space to store the plywood directly on the wall behind the rolling bin. Next to our lumber area we will have two 6 foot tall utility shelves for storage, with some storage bins to keep things looking neat and organized.

That's really the end of the right side wall, around the corner is the garbage can annex and the door to the workroom, which I didn't bother to mock up. The workroom will mostly be used for lawn tool storage, with three sections of slatwall and a third utility shelf.

So, that's the plans for now! I can't wait to get started this weekend, since my husband's ankle will hopefully be better by then (he's off the crutches now, but still limping). I LOVE organizing things, so I can't wait to get all of the cleaning, building and painting done so we can get to the fun part, finding the perfect place for everything!

Have you ever done an intensive organizing of your garage? Or went to the effort to paint your garage? It's a little silly, I know, but I can't help it, it's the second thing I'm most looking forward to with this room makeover, after getting to organize everything!