Maxing out Garage Storage

Ideally, we’d love to have an actual mudroom or entryway some day, but for now, we are making do with the space we have. If you know us, you know we I have a lot of shoes. There’s really not a great space in our house for our shoes to live, so we’ve been keeping them in the garage.

Well, we’ve engineered a somewhat functional solution that we hope to keep improving. It’s a big improvement actually. With winter on the way, this will give us a central location for all the snow pants, jackets, hats and everything else. And it’s a step up from keeping them all in bins!

Another reason for doing this was to consolidate our collective stuff and centralize it from the crawl space and multiple closets around the house.

We have one of the four garage walls completely sheetrocked and painted, so that’s the wall we are working with! Bonus points for hanging things up to save floor space. Before, we’d been using this shelf for a media storage area in the old movie room, but now we’re using it for shoes, shoes and more shoes.

We found a couple old cupboards in the garage.They look like they once belonged in the kitchen. In fact, I know they were from the kitchen. Although I have no idea where anyone could squeeze more cupboards in there! So we’re repurposing them for this new area.

Joe, on a whim, decided to hang the cupboards, so we had to first check for studs in the wall and any electrical wiring that we didn’t want to interfere with. Highly recommend using a tool for this part to be extra safe. Especially with kitchen electrical directly on the other side of the wall.

You don’t even want to know how we got this up all by ourselves… It was a tricky, tricky process.

This white cupboard was the one we took out from above the kitchen peninsula on move-in day.

So, 2 + 2 = 4. We now have a little storage area in the garage! I plan to paint the right one white to match. See the wood beam on the left? That’s where I braced the cupboard while Joe screwed it into the wall. It was so heavy! I feel like science and math were the real MVP’s here. There is no plausible way for two people to hang cupboards on their own otherwise.

So we’ve got a pretty neat little nook now. Joe’s aunt and uncle gave us the bench to the left. It has hooks and the bench seat lifts up; a great area for scarves and mittens!

Now to just reframe the door so it stops swinging into the garage door track every time we walk inside. But one thing at a time, right?

I’m inspired by some of these gorgeous garage entries. I might fashion some kind of cushion for the bench. We might paint the bench white to match as well. The end goal is to make it an extension of the house, where we can have gatherings. It seems like so much untapped real estate! I’m glad we’re putting it to good use.

I love how you can see the matching cupboards through the door to the kitchen! Full circle. It’s a work in progress, but it feels so much cleaner to us.

And, most importantly, I’ve got plenty of shoe storage 🙂