Garage organization, a(nother) quarantine project

Last time I talked about home projects in depth on the blog I told y'all we'd be doing a quick basement bathroom renovation. 

(extreme Ross voice) PIVOT! We decided to organize the garage and finally get our ish in gear in there instead, mostly because David was motivated to do it and as he's the muscle on the projects at casa Gokie, we go where his muscles lead us a lot of the time.

Our garage has been the biggest blessing in this new house -- well, not new, since we've lived here for four years already. Time flies! But in our previous house, we had a one-stall, detached garage, with a wonky door that didn't open very easily. Moving to this house with a 4+ stall garage has been AMAZING. David and I joke constantly that we'd be willing to downsize if we can keep the same amount of garage space.

That being said, with a four stall garage, we didn't have it organized very well. When you have a giant amount of space there's not a lot of motivation to really make it work the best for you, until now!

Here are some poor before photos, which I took hurriedly one day while David started patching a wall, in all its messy and unorganized glory.

proof that these are really before photos because I didn't even straighten this photo haha

To quickly sum up the issues we were having:

1. Everything looked messy. We had some pseudo-storage, but it just still looked disorganized. There was a lot of stuff just randomly placed, and the placements didn't really make sense.

2. The wood in the corner near the black cabinets was SO hard to access when we needed it, and just took up too much space. 

3. The stacked lawn tools were too high for me to reach when I needed them (shovels etc. above the table saw near the door).

4. The wall of black cabinets were overloaded with stuff, to the point where it was really impossible to keep them organized. 

5. The brown pegboard on the back far wall was broken through in a couple places -- cheap pegboard has a tendency to break if you put heavy things on it. 

6. The strollers were always out and taking up floor space even in the winter when they're not used.

7. We have collections of project materials leftover from past work that didn't need to be easily accessible all the time, but no good place to put them (i.e. tiling supplies, leftover duct work, extra can lights, etc.). 

8. Obviously it was all dingy and dirty too and needed some new lighting and better workflow.

The first thing we did was to take off this weird black foam/pegboard that was on one of the walls (halfway behind our extra fridge / freezer). We're not entirely sure why it was there? Before David ripped it off we were worried there'd be a big hole behind it but nope -- just drywall with a bunch of glue. 

He skim coated it with joint compound and voila, regular wall back!

The next thing we did was gulp a little bit and buy 3 Fleximount storage systems to mount on the ceiling for additional storage. They are not cheap -- we spent a little over $500 for the three of them altogether. But they're very sturdy and came super well-reviewed. (I think Husky makes similar ones you can find at Home Depot normally, but they were out of stock in the sizes we wanted the last time I checked.) We bought two 4x8s for above the garage door and one 3x8 for wood above the fridge. (Not affiliate links, just wanted to share!) 

We figured it wasn't a bad idea to spend a little more here if it's for something that will hold heavy materials above our heads. 

They're relatively straightforward to install, especially with so many junior employees helping out. ;)

Here's a picture of the wood one installed!

I'll have some more other photos of the finished product on the reveal post. :)

Next up was figuring out a solution for the walls by our cars. We had some shelves there for random crap, one of which came with the house, one of which we installed to match. They didn't function well because I couldn't really reach them and stuff just sat there, inaccessible. It took awhile for me to convince David to move our long tool storage there, as well as all of our various sports equipment, since those were the narrowest things we needed a place for. I was ultimately successful. Go me!!!

The walls were pretty dinged up and needed a patch coat as well as some paint before putting anything in. More help from our junior employees!

Because we were a) cheap and b) trying to avoid going places to buy supplies, we mixed together a bunch of leftover paint to paint this. Some of it was primer, some of it was just straight white paint (no tint), some was a tinted white we'd used in the kitchen. We barely had enough to cover these walls stretching it pretty much as far as it would go. They're also not exactly the same because we mixed and painted on two different days, so the ratio was different. No one can tell, even David and his eagle (ahem perfectionist) eyes.

After a lot of debate, we settled on this Rubbermaid FastTrack system for each wall. They come in different lengths and the Home Depot near us had a lot in stock, although you can also buy them on Amazon! To stretch each wall length, we used three 84" lengths on one wall, then two 84" and one 48" length on the other, all mounted right next to each other. The frames are relatively inexpensive ($17x5 + $10) but the pricey part comes with all the attachments. They function really nicely, though, and we wanted to invest in something sturdy that could stay with the house and really hold all of our stuff securely.

I'll get some better pictures again later for the "reveal" when we're done but they're already looking so sharp and organized! It's very functional and super nice that you can change the clips whenever you want to arrange things differently.

This post is already too long so I will stop riiiiight here. Next post will be hopefully the rest of the work, and then after that a reveal! It's already feeling so nice and motivating us to keep the whole garage clean (which is no easy feat). Until then!

HG