Garage Storage Hacks You Need Right Now!

March 21, 2017

In the last decade, the demand for three and four-car garages has sky-rocketed, and nowhere is that more evident than the new home lake community of Southshore. And while your garage offers great storage space, it can easily become a cluttered dumping ground for everything we don’t want IN the house.

To avoid the catchall syndrome, here are a few tips and hacks to help with garage organization.

Upcycled Garage Storage

HGTV has a half-dozen upcycle ideas for items you might already have, like plastic window planters that can hold spray paint cans. Or coffee canisters that easily turn into dispensers for rope, twine and string.

garageSadie Season Goods made this attractive “clip board” with used clothespins, some wire and a piece of leftover plywood. If you don’t have any extra wooden planks laying around, check the Habitat ReStore (with locations in Denver and Littleton).

Paint storage in your garage is usually considered a no-no, so Angela at Blue I Style traded out the ugly paint cans for clear WalMart canisters ($1.99 each). Her free printable labels, make stacking and identifying an attractive snap.

For Handy People

Richard H. at Home Talk got tired of having his tools scattered all over his garage and came up with these two-door storage units. With pegboard interiors and casters, they roll around for reconfiguring your garage and can be built in a couple of concentrated weekends.

Also on Home Talk, handy gal Carole used an old pallet to corral odd-shaped and sized garden tools, brushes and brooms.

Bob Vila finds new uses for dated (and but still useful) stuff, like an old metal filing cabinet destined for the landfill. He gave it new life as a garage tool organizer. Sideways, mind you, with a coat of new paint and a couple of pegboards.

garageCassie, aka the Sugar Plum blogger, is about to overflow with organizational info. She uses tin cans to hold smaller items like brushes, scissors and pencils and hung them from a pegboard painted to match her back door. We’ve seen it before, but still love the repurposed canvas shoe holder to corral spray paint cans ($8 at Sears.com).

If your garbage and lawn/leaf bags are hard to reach, using a paper towel holder solves that dilemma. Lifehacker.com offers up this and other clever uses in the garage for ordinary household items.

Get a Garage System

If you’re short on time and DIY skills, you can always grab what you need, prefabricated. For example, a storage system kit for hanging bikes and sporting equipment is available at Costco for $400. It includes two 4-foot by 8-foot racks for overhead bins and plenty of utility hooks. (There are smaller kits, too.)

The organizational gurus recommend the plastic bins over cardboard boxes for garage storage to keep the dust out and prevent pests from crawling into containers. Home improvement stores like Home Depot sell the heavy-duty lidded containers, gallons of them, both singles and multi-packs from $9 to $60.

Costco also has an assortment of stationary or rolling metal shelving units, or in enclosed metal cabinets to organize your extras.

Not Garage-Friendly

The three overarching rules for what not to store in your garage are:

  • Items that could be damaged by extreme temperatures
  • Anything potentially ruined by moisture and humidity
  • Hazardous materials that could damage your home

These include food, wine, important documents and paint.

Pinterest always has 1,000+ pins to make to motivate you – now all you need is a cluttered garage and a weekend or two of free time!

Southshore Choices

Customize your garage AND the interior of your new home at the master-planned community of Southshore. Tour the stunning Village Homes Artistry models, the spanking-new Delaney model from Richmond American Homes and new plans by  Century Communities  at The Hills at Southshore, and seize the possibilities! Lakeside living in the master-planned community features both ranch and two-story models, priced from the $400s to the $700s.