For many years I never had a garage, and once we moved into a current home we had that opportunity to utilise it, but like most people in England we don’t use our garage to store the car, we use it to store a variety of things, but as time has gone on it had some changes and even still it’s perhaps not finished, but what do we do with it? what could we use in it?
Our Garage has gone through many changes and no doubt many other peoples have as well, in reality, id love for it to be a display for lego, for example, others have converted into an office or games room etc, however, we haven’t. Being a big family we gather a lot of stuff, and if you have seen my other posts about Halloween and Xmas, we have a lot of stuff kicking around at times of the year, and at times it needs to stay in there, let alone like a family does it builds just stuff and stuff and stuff…
But this allows us to have the home fairly tidy and clean, we don’t use the loft and are not clutter people, thus we don’t have lots of units filled everywhere, that’s not Boo and I, we aren’t clean organised ultra type people but it does give us a chance to be fairly organised, as much as you can with 3 kids.
With our Garage being used for storage there’s a couple of key things that we have focused on, one was plastic Tubs! we are that generation that saw the rise of these in the late ’90s and early ’00s every bigger shop sold them, let alone all the small general ones, all sorts of sizes colours, some that fit under beds, stack etc.. id arguably say that every house has at least one plastic tub if not many more, we ourselves had a whole variety over the years but has settled over the last 4 years on these larger boxes at Ikea.
They are larger Litre storage but has outside clips, in reality, they are similar to many other large rectangle plastic tubs, why would I get them? it’s neat and can stack, being a rectangle shape garage making a brick stackable against the walls.
In reality, you can place these however you want, we have gone with the sides and making a corridor, but placed at the back half, Boo being organised designed and printed on stickers to stick to the front of these tubs, this allows us to see the Xmas ones for example straight away.
The alternative for many in storage from Tubs/ Boxes is a shelf, we have tried shelves and again if I could have put lego in there I would have used wooden Billy or Besta shelves from Ikea, on the flip for general stuff like tools/garden/ cables etc the pop up plastic ones are useful, there light and easy to make with plastic tubes and plastic shelves that all just slot together with no tools, you can also fix them to the wall with a bracket but there is a weight limit, there mobile and can be moved around which is also very useful, sizes can vary but most shops like Argos, Amazon, Range etc have pretty standard ones now.
If you were wanting more permanent versions than brackets, with bracket strips screwed into the wall allows not only more secureness to the shelves but you can screw as much or as little around the whole garage, with brackets attached the wood pieces can be as long as you want them to be, but these are much more permanent than the plastic ones, in the same logic you can also screw-in free standing brackets than things like tools can be hung on, but once again these are screwed into the wall potentially using a pan head screw.
A Fridge?
Now, this isn’t exactly storage but we do store excess freezer foods, having the advantage sometimes of getting reduced stuff or discounted items can be great but then if there chilled or frozen you can often only hold so much, we have a normal fridge freezer in the house and like most people you can only store so much in your 3 or 4 tray/shelves.
We invested into an open-top chest freezer with this in mind, again a big family of 5 means that we need food and when we come across those bargains like bread, there’s only so much you can have, and certainly fit in the little one, but not always those food items as cheap, so we have to jump on them when we can, it also allowed us to buy sometime sin bulk, like chicken pieces etc this allows us to make pots and freeze them separately ready for meals, all of this isn’t exactly storage but in reality, I have recommended this idea countless times to friends.
