Looking for the right storage setup to organize your garage floors tends to be a product of pent up frustration at the state of your garage. Your garage is probably a total mess, and you’re wondering how to tidy things up with the minimum amount of effort and guarantee that it’ll be easy to keep things organized in the future.
In this article, we’ll take a look at a few of the options that might interest you when it comes to garage organization and usability.
There are a few options for storing the stuff that’s in your garage. You can put your stuff on the floor, into cabinets, onto wire shelves, or into and onto workbench surfaces. Most garages don’t come standard with any storage solution other than the floor, so that’s where we’ll start.
If your garage is like mine, the de facto storage surface in the garage is the garage’s floor. We’ve all been there: sometimes after getting home from a long ski trip or an afternoon of working in the garden, we just don’t have enough energy to put things away in their proper places, and so the dirty stuff ends up sitting in a pile on the garage floor.
The floor isn’t a great place for your valuables for a lot of obvious reasons, the most important of which is that the floor doesn’t help to organize any of your stuff whatsoever. For large and durable items like bags of soil, the floor is probably okay. You’re probably here because the floor isn’t cutting it for you, but for large and awkward items like skis or shovels, it might be the only choice.
Cabinets are under-represented in garages, which is a shame because you likely use them extensively elsewhere in your house to great organizational effect. You can easily install robust cabinets in your garage, too—but you’ll have to pick where the cabinets are attached to the wall, and how high up.
Using cabinets that are mounted high will allow you to place other storage features—like a workbench or dedicated floor area—immediately beneath it, which will help you to maximize the storage space.
Cabinets work best for smaller and relatively clean items that are kicking around your garage like spare flower pots or seeds. It’s probably best to keep any chemicals or actively used tools away from your cabinets because they might stain the cabinet’s bottom.
Wire shelving is a great option for a lot of the items which aren’t appropriate for cabinets or the floor. Wire shelving tends to have a greater weight bearing capacity than cabinets do in addition to being more open, so you won’t have much trouble putting medium sized tools or heavier objects in.
Smaller objects can find a home within wire shelving too, but they risk being jostled off if there are other items on the shelf. Putting dirty items onto your wire shelves won’t be an issue, so long as you don’t worry about the items on the shelves beneath the dirty stuff. Wire shelving itself doesn’t get very dirty even if it houses dirty objects, and there’s no way that the metal will get stained or scuffed.
Workbenches aren’t the right choice for all of your garage storage needs, but for stuff like chemicals, tools, and anything that is small and super dirty, they’ll do the trick. Workbenches have surfaces that won’t stain or seep, and often have a few drawers that you can put other items in.
If you put a workbench in your garage, you’ll also change the aesthetic of your garage quite a bit, giving it a more active (and old-timey!) feeling that might spice things up a bit if you’re going to be in your garage a lot.
Workbenches can accommodate very heavy objects and are super easy to clean. Unfortunately, workbenches take up a ton of space within your garage floor, and they can be extremely hard to move because of how heavy they are.
Workbenches can also be quite expensive depending on what their primary surface is made out of; a slate surface with a chemical resistant finish will probably cost a lot more than a simple hard plastic surface.
The final choice is up to you, and you’ll have to decide which organizational scheme is the best for your use of the garage’s floor space.
Don’t worry about setting up the options we discussed here; we’ll help you implement anything that appeals to you. Contact us today to talk about how you can use our garage storage products to tame the hurricane that’s in your garage and return usability to one of your house’s critical spaces.
