Our complete Garage Renovation

I always wanted to keep a tidy garage, where in case of hail (which we have somewhat often in Texas) we can just move our cars under shelter. But we discovered that stuff accumulates really fast. Before you know it there’s barely room to walk and it looks terrible. Here are the three main things we did for our complete garage renovation to organize our garage and make it look nice on a budget.

To preface this I’d like to add that the majority of the material was bought with money we earned from a garage sale. You can read about here.

The first thing we did was install pegboard for my husband to store most of his tools. I wanted it in a way that looked nice and didn’t take up much space. I put it up where he had his tool table that was usually just a pile of disorganized tools. It ended up being really easy. All you need is a drill, level, stud finder, pegboard, and spacers. He also decided to get ½” square dowel for some extra support that you can run behind your pegboard and nail into place. After it was installed, I purchased this pegboard accessory kit and I was able to fit almost everything! Including a kobalt chainsaw and leaf blower. It’s stronger than I thought it would be.

Pro-tip, if you’re installing it yourself and need to holding it up and don’t have three arms, you can shoot a line of nails along your level line that stick out, and rest the board on that for a bit, like this:

After installing the pegboard, this is what we were looking at.

The next step in our garage renovation was to build much better shelves. Luckily, he had lots of ¾” MDF leftover from his work, so that’s what I built them out of. After deciding on the dimensions I wanted the shelves to be, I installed some braces to give the shelves support all the way through, instead of only where the brackets would be. This is what they looked like.

Those little strips coming down run along the studs and are where the brackets are going to go. He decided to do it this way instead of leaving space between for the brackets. This way the horizontal strips would be stronger and the brackets could reach out a little farther. Then he just cut the MDF to length, using this method to scribe along the very uneven wall, primed and painted, and installed the brackets! This is what the shelves look like now after I did some organizing and my husband installed a small tool rack between the shelves and pegboard:

BEFORE

AFTER

You might be thinking to yourself, ‘There’s no way they fit that much stuff there.’ You’re correct! The third thing we did for our garage renovation to organize it was to throw away a bunch of junk! Yes, some of it may be usable in the future, but how far in the future? How much would it cost to replace? Maybe it wouldn’t ever actually be used.

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Now we can fit our cars inside if we ever need to, and our garage isn’t an eyesore or tripping hazard anymore. Besides, not all projects have to be making things beautiful. Some of them we do just to organize our house and make it more efficient for us.