Use of your home garage

If your garage is a mess, don’t feel bad… you’re not alone. In fact, most people tend to use their garage as a catch-all rather than a useful and practical part of their home. When people have something bulky they want to keep, but not in their home, the garage is often where it ends up. Naturally, the garage is the easiest and most convenient place to put it. This is perfectly fine, at least for a while. Eventually the garage becomes overwhelmingly full of stuff and it gets harder and harder to find it.

The first step in dealing with garage clutter is to get rid of it as much as possible. You can have a garage sale, donate it, recycle it, or just throw it in the trash. Unfortunately, for a wide variety of reasons, many items are just too hard to give up. Therefore, they need their own place in the garage. The idea is to get as much stuff off the ground as possible. Use the wall and ceiling space in your garage by installing different types of shelves and racks. Use cabinets, bins, and bins to organize smaller items like sporting goods, tools, and hardware. Before you know it, you’ll be able to use your garage for what it was really intended for… parking your vehicle!

Now that you’ve found a new space in your garage, you should consider integrating a decent workbench, or even a small workshop. This will give you a place to organize and complete home repair, maintenance, and hobby projects. You have many options to find the right workbench for you. You can buy one at your local home improvement center, pick one up at a garage sale, find one in classifieds, online, or even build one yourself. The advantage of building one yourself is that you can design it to fit perfectly in the space you have available. Once you have a nice workbench, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

You can use your workbench to finish your garage. Insulation and dry walls in your garage will help keep it considerably warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. If you have room in the attic of your garage, you can put some plywood in there to create
a significant amount of available storage space. Next, dry off the underside of the joists and install a hinged access door about 2 1/2 feet wide and 6 feet long for all your stuff to get in and out of your new storage space. You can also protect your garage floor from automotive fluids and winter sleet with a floor coating such as paint, epoxy, or garage floor tile.

When it comes to your home garage, there are an unlimited number of things you can do to improve it. The important thing is not to get overwhelmed. Break it up into little jobs that you can work on here and there. Take your time and have fun with it. If you fear it, you probably won’t. Look ahead to the big picture, but slowly take it one step at a time. When you slow down and look around, you’ll likely come up with a lot of ideas for how to make better use of your garage. Before you know it, your garage will be more useful and practical than you ever imagined!