Little By Little

The garage has been an ongoing project in the house. When we moved in, we knew it would need some work. It was in good shape, it just needed some storage and counter space so we could accomplish more things throughout the rest house. We started by getting the entire garage generally organized with what was already built. For more on that, check out the blog post here.

Since the initial clean up, we've managed to work a little at a time to give everything a home. It's probably been about six months, but it was totally worth it.

After the above pictures was taken, I tore out the far side of the shelves to leave more space for walking into the garage. Scott also mounted the two blue cabinets (that were originally in our tiny laundry room) so we could have some elevated storage space. Sorry about the quality of the rest of the pictures, they were all taken with my phone.

Still a mess, but a mess in progress!

I found some pegboard about a month ago and attached it to the wall with some 1x1s that we had in the scrap wood pile. For all of $14, we finally had a place to put our tools! Previously, they were literally in a heap on the ground just outside the garage door. Safe, right?!

One of the pegboards is dedicated to just hand tools. I even used our old kitchen knife magnet (right) to hold chisels and saw blades.

The other is just for painting equipment. Paint trays are perfect to stick on pegboards because the feet just loop over the top. Easy peasy!

It's amazing how much storage space all of the paintbrushes, rollers, tape, and putty knives took up! Once they were out of the way, we could move on to Phase 4: Workbench.

This was probably the most arduous task...

Not really. It was easy. I just pulled off the top shelf of the existing unit and called it a day.

It's the perfect workbench height and once we mount lights (currently sitting on the workbench) under the metal cabinets, we will have a great space to work on all kinds of projects, big and small!

I know this probably isn't exciting to anyone but Scott and I, but believe me, "Woohoo!"s are in order. We can finally walk into the garage, grab a screw driver, complete a task, and put the screwdriver back without threat of being stabbed or cut from some errant blade or saw in our 'Tool Pile'. We also have enough space to work on smaller items that might need soldering or some simple repair without having to use the kitchen counter.

The only downside is that we only have one outlet in the garage...and it's on the other side of the car itself. We need to put an outlet or two near the workbench to really make it fully functional, but for now, we're just happy to have something resembling an efficient work space!

Do you have a work area like this in your garage? Do you think it's useful or a waste of storage space for other items? Let us know in the comments!