It’s an exciting time in our garage makeover adventure–installing storage! The only real space we have is at the very back of the garage on one side. Here’s what that area looked like before the drywall finishing and painting:
It’s pretty obvious this isn’t a very big space, but we wanted to pack a lot of function into the area. Specifically we wanted to fit a large storage cabinet, a workbench area with tool storage, and some wall cabinets. That’s a lot to cram into a 77.5″ wide area! After a lot of searching online, I found this cabinet set from NewAge Products:
Their garage cabinets are sold at Costco and Sam’s Club, but this configuration is only on their website. (If you need one, it’s on sale right now!) This is not a sponsored post, this is just what we found and purchased for our space. 🙂
This set was exactly what I was picturing for storage in our garage makeover. I am so happy their Bold line had smaller cabinets than most garage cabinets. This whole set is 78″ wide. But wait…isn’t our space 77.5″ wide? Yes, there’s a story on that later…
Anyway, we moved the storage cabinet and base cabinets into place to check the spacing. Everything was looking great! And then we tried to put the bamboo counter on. I knew it was going to be 0.5″ too long, but I was hoping beyond hope that maybe it would hit the water softener at a point where the water softener curved in a little bit or something. Nope. It was a full inch too long since the corner wasn’t perfectly square and pushed the storage cabinet to the left a bit. So then we had to wait for the water softener company to come out and move the water softener a few inches to the left. Sigh. The good news is that relocating the water softener gave us a tiny storage area to the left of the tool cabinet.
Once we knew everything would fit, we anchored the cabinets to the wall and each other. Everything lined up perfectly once we had made sure everything was level. This was definitely a two person job! None of the stuff was particularly heavy, but holding a wall cabinet above your head, making sure it’s level, and then somehow screwing it into the wall is not something that a single person can do on their own (unless they have much longer arms and bigger muscles than I do).
Just look at this space now! It’s so much more functional! We even scooted the whole thing to the left a few inches so I could store large pieces of plywood against the wall. I’m super pleased with how sturdy these cabinets are and how they look. We didn’t install the slatwall that came with the set because of the outlet. Our studs are spaced 24″ apart instead of 16″ so moving the outlet would have put it right next to the water heater which wasn’t convenient or desirable. This space is also so small that we didn’t want things hanging on that wall and jutting into the worktop area.
The storage cabinet and lower cabinet have nice adjustable shelving that makes it so easy to store everything.
The tool chest has foam liners in all of the drawers which help keep the tools in place. There are also LED light bars under the wall cabinets.
Now it’s time to get everything put away and organized. It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come. This garage is looking better than ever thanks to this storage makeover!
Our final step will be adding tons of (shallow) organization to the right side of the wall. Somehow we will turn this wall into an area that stores all of our yard tools, ladders, extra wood, folding worktables, saw horses, etc. We only have about 12″ of depth we can work with so I’ll have to get extra creative! Stay tuned for the final post in this series. 🙂
If you missed the first two posts in the series, check them out below!
