Plans for Updating our Garage

I’ve shown a lot of spaces in our home over the years, but there’s one space I haven’t really ever shown and it’s been for good reason.

Our garage.

You know how people pick a word of the year? Well I’m picking a word of the summer: this is going to be the summer of STORAGE. Ha! I am actually very excited for this – we’ve lived in this house for four years now and we’ve just kind of been working with what we have in terms of our storage spaces but it’s high time to finally get these spaces working better for our family. Our garage feels like the best, most logical place to start. And yikes these photos make me cringe but they also make me all the more ready to finally make some changes!

It’s not the most glamourous space to update, but there’s no doubt it’s a workhorse for us and it needs to be functioning better to meet our needs in our current stage of life. Here’s what I’m planning to do:

1. Clear everything out and purge!

The garage is kind of a dumping zone for all the random things that don’t have a place anywhere else. When we moved, a lot of things got placed here and never touched again: my knee brace from ACL surgery 15 years ago, old hiking boots, kickboxing gloves, extra jumper cables and who knows what else.

Also, the previous owners raised four boys here but by the time they sold the house, the boys were grown. They knew we had small children and so they left quite a few things that their boys had outgrown like sand toys and sports equipment. The storage rack with all the basketballs, soccer balls, etc was left by them and it has served us pretty well, but we’ve actually never taken the time to clear out everything and see what all is in it. And of course, over the past four years we’ve just accumulated more and more things – step one is clear everything out and do a major purge!

2. Create built in storage under the stairs

We may keep the ball storage rack from the previous owners, but we definitely need to add much more storage in this area. So far we’ve just been using the random storage shelves we brought from our last home and the existing small wall shelves; it’s been fine but definitely not ideal. I’m picturing simple but sturdy wooden shelves all along the right corner built to hold large bins of equipment.

My goal is to actually get to the point where the majority of items in our garage are stored underneath these stairs but that will only be possible by maximizing every vertical inch!

3. Better utilize side wall shelving

The previous owners installed simple shelving on the side walls. We don’t want to add more shelving because we want to leave space to walk around the sides of cars, but I think the shelves could be better organized and utilized to maximize efficient storage. This also includes the small shelving area at the bottom of our stairs where we keep our recycling!

4. Paint?

Our garage has very tall walls and I’m not sure painting would be worth the effort, but at the same time, if we’re going to all this other work, we might as well get the space looking nicer altogether? If we were the only people who ever see our garage I might not be interested in painting, but because this is the entrance people use to access our basement anytime we host, I think it might be worth it. If nothing else, getting rid of all the cobwebs would make a big difference! We’ll see how motivated we feel to paint once everything is cleared out of the garage.

Today’s going to be a beautiful sunny day so it’s a good time to get started – I’ll be sharing the progress in real time over on Instagram so be sure to follow along there if you want the play-by-play!