An Imagination Station

Our garage is a single car garage. It might not be huge, but it definitely acts as many different spaces for us. We build, paint, cut, and store our stuff there as well as our car (especially with the snowy winter we've been having). Unfortunately, we hadn't really had a chance to give it any love because we were so worried about the rest of the house. Yesterday, though, the weather was nice enough that I was able to spend 4 hours cleaning it up and out. Now it's much closer to a workable area.

I wish I had a good picture of the before. I kind of started working on it on a whim, so I was about halfway done when I realized I hadn't taken any pictures. Needless to say, though, it was a disaster. There was barely enough room to walk around the car when it was parked, and you couldn't find anything even with a map.

The end result of some rearranging, storing in the attic, and $6 worth of 'organization equipment' really made a huge difference. Here is the after.

I ended up moving everything into stations. Not only did I feel it would be easier for us to keep organized, but it also reminded me of one of the DVD extras from one of our favorite shows, the Venture Brothers. In it, they describe their drawing studio in different 'stations', such as the 'rejuvenation station' and the 'relaxation station'.

We start with the left wall.

Everything is on an old bookcase that we've had out there (in the way) for a while. It really helps because you can really see which bottles are which. The second shelf down is actually holding both of our drills and the teal bin holds ALL of our bits. We have a LOT of them, so keeping them all in one place is key.

Next to the Automotive Station, we have the Gardening Station.

Which includes all of our gardening and cleaning tools finally put in an area where they aren't leaned against a corner or falling behind the lawn mower. Making this little organizer is quick and cheap, too.

I bought a pre-cut 2 ft. piece of PVC pipe from Home Depot and chopped it down into two-three inch sections. Then I took a piece of scrap wood and drilled from wood-to-pipe from the back to create a mount for the PVC. To attach it to the wall, I just used four screws and screwed the wood itself to the wall to secure it. That's it. Everything fits real well and there are no moving parts, so it won't break like some of the other garage organizers I looked at. $6 win!

Next to the Gardening Station, we have the Recreation Station.

Mountain bike, both camp packs, and our tent are hung up (into studs) and out of the way. Getting things off the floor and onto the walls was key in getting such a small area organized. It really doubles your amount of space because you can't move outward, but you can move upward. I manged to not have to buy any hooks because we had a large pack we purchased when we had a storage space in the apartment. I found most of them and was able to use them again! Huzzah!

Moving along the garage door (which I suppose could be considered the 'Importation Station'), we get to the less consonance-appropriate title of ...

Not super interesting, but it does keep it from tripping us and splintering our feet. For some reason, this was laying down next to where the car pulls in before I moved it. There is no accounting for the stupidity of our past.

As you can see a glimpse of next to the Wood and Scrap Station, we have the

We only have one (1, uno, single, solo) outlet in our garage. That's right. One. Not only that, but it's not grounded. We have a solitary outlet that only holds two prongs in our garage (where, of course, most power tools are three). So far, this has not been fun. It's on our list of things to fix (along with the rest of the house which has the same issue (except for the kitchen)), but we were waiting until maybe this summer or fall to take care of it.

Till then, we can at least charge our equipment in style. I found a bunch of brackets and boards from Scott's old Pint Night shelves (which we weren't going to use for the same purpose in the house), so I grabbed some and set up this little guy right above the outlet. This way it's at eye level so it's easily accessible, but it's also a collection station for all of the batteries for our saws and drills.

Next to the charging station is the rest of the Recreation Station. We love to camp and hike and I looove to ride my bike, so having them in the garage is a must, but like his brethren across the garage, he must be off the floor and out of the way.

See the yellow frames? That's for another project that will be showing up here soon!

I am so pleased with the result of a couple of hours work. The only part that I'm not completely ready to tackle is the big shelving unit.

We have plans for it, but they will have to wait for warmer weather. Here is the ugliest Photoshop sketch I could ever reveal to you to give a rough idea as to what we would like to do.

Those blue cabinets were actually originally in the laundry room, but I had Scott take them out because they blocked a lot of light and made the space look smaller than it already looked. We kept them, though, and are hoping to mount them (maybe this weekend?) so we can use them for additional storage (the doors can't open because they are just sitting on the shelf right now).

Then, we want to take out about half of the shelving and just have an open space next to the door. We will either use that for larger tools (a bandsaw or table saw), or possible a deep freeze I've had my eye on. Possibly just a shoe rack. Who knows. Those are all a long way off from our minds at the moment.

Once we have the shelves cut down to create a workbench and the cabinets mounted, we would like to pegboard the reachable parts of the wall so we can put things like hammers, screwdrivers, and other small tools in an organized yet reachable space. All of this would really make our lives (especially our DIY lives) much easier.

For right now, though, we are just enjoying something that we haven't had since we moved all of our stuff in: space to walk around the car with ease.

And not just one path,

We even have a tiny path on the other side of the car that doesn't involve having to jump over boxes and boards!

Yesterday was a big success on the garage-front. We are really hoping that this will help us get done with more DIY projects quicker because we know where everything is! Have you ever organized something and it just made you love the space that much more? Let me know in the comments!