Garage = FINISHED!!

I am excited to say that we are FINALLY finished with our garage organization project. Yay!!!!! It’s been a long process that we started almost a year ago and have worked on in phases since then. To say that it is a huge improvement would be an understatement for sure. I will just let the pictures do the talking :)

Here is a picture of our garage the summer after we bought the house. The walls were bare but extremely scuffed and dirty, and the trim was the same horrible shade of pinky-beige that must have been original to the house. The blinds were too small and didn’t even cover the entire windows.

So…it had potential! It just needed a little help :)

This was taken last spring after we moved everything in the garage to the center so that we could start the painting process.

Here is a closeup of one of the windows after we’d taken down the old blinds. This picture gives you a better idea of how horrible that trim looked…yuck!!

So, last spring we got started with the transformation. The first step was repainting the walls and trim. We chose a very light gray color for the walls and painted the trim/doors white to match the rest of the trim inside the house. I didn’t think to take a picture right after we finished painting, but trust me…it was a HUGE improvement just doing that alone.

Our project came to a screeching halt over the summer when we got pretty busy, but we eventually got back to work. I guess it was probably sometime in the late summer/early fall when we bought a few big metal storage shelving units from Home Depot and put those together. They were easy to assemble, and it was so nice to finally have a place to put all the things that had just been sitting on the garage floor for years.

Football season soon arrived, and we took another break for a few months before finally getting around to the last step in the project–mounting the Rubbermaid Fasttrack system on the empty walls for hanging stuff. We started working on this part after Christmas and finished up last weekend. It was just what we needed to find a spot for the items that wouldn’t make sense to store on the shelves.

So, without further ado…I present to you our newly organized garage!!!!! (Ignore the dirt/leaves on the floor…it still needs to be swept out…haha).

Yay!!!!!

And, here’s the before-and-after so you can really see the transformation…

And, here are some of the specific areas of the garage and what they are being used for…

Left side of the garage looking in

It is WONDERFUL to be able to keep my mops/brooms out here now. Before, they were all stuffed behind the washing machine, and it was a pain to get them out. This is so much easier. We also have our old tennis shoes that we use for working in the yard hanging up (Travis’s idea) to keep the bugs out…haha :)

The boxes on top are full of Brooklyn’s and Savannah’s bedding, so once their rooms are finished, that top shelf will be free. It’s also been great to have a place for stuff like paper towels, toilet paper, diapers, and cat food/litter. Our suitcases, infant car seat, and ice cream maker are also stored on these shelves :) To the right of the shelf are Travis’s golf clubs, our patio umbrella, and the grill.

This is the left side of the back wall of the garage. Hanging our coolers was GENIUS! That freed up space on one of our shelves, and the coolers are really easy to get to now. It’s also the perfect place to keep my reusable grocery bags :)

The rest of the back wall. Those shelves are holding Christmas decorations, books, paint cans, the hose, and other random outdoor stuff. Travis loved having our Christmas decorations in the garage last December instead of up in the attic. It’s so much easier to get to everything now!

The back right corner of the garage holds a bunch of stuff that needed to be hung up to get it off the floor. The jogging stroller, weed eater, blower, tennis rackets, fishing pole/net, camp chairs, etc. are all hanging here :)

Check out those nice new blinds! :) The right wall is pretty crowded when Travis’s car is pulled in, so it didn’t need to have anything on it sticking out very far. The area in between the windows was the perfect spot for hanging the ladder and other yard tools :)

On the other side of the window near the garage door, we mounted some hanging baskets for some small items we had.

The baskets are organized into different groups: the top two baskets hold gardening stuff (L) and painting supplies (R). The bottom baskets hold tools (L) and outdoor play stuff (R) like sidewalk chalk, bubbles, tennis balls, baseball gloves, etc.

I guess that’s it! We are very excited about how it turned out. We have so much more stuff stored in the garage than we ever did before, but we have more room to walk around too because it’s not all on the floor. The good news is that we still have a few more spots on the shelves for more storage bins, so it’s not filled to capacity just yet.

Now, onto the next project…getting Brooklyn’s new room and Savannah’s nursery ready!! :)