Double garages have always been at a premium even when I was young and every home was on its own block. Today, houses are bigger on smaller blocks and the garage sits inside the building. A double garage is still at a premium and maximising your garage walls has become ever more important.
If you are building or have just built your new home, your garage walls (atleast 2 of them) will be shared with the inside of your home. This means you are usually starting out with 2 or 3 empty white plasterboard walls, and one exterior facing wall made from brick or your chosen exterior surface.
The challenge for you now is maximising your garage walls so that you can fit as much as possible whilst keeping it all nice and tidy.
Maximising Your Garage Walls
The typical first step for most households when decking out their garage is to seek out shelving (aluminium shelving). Shelving offers a great way to stack as much as possible into your garage utilising most of your available vertical and horizontal space. Aluminium shelving ranges in price from $150 for a 2m x 2m x 0.5m frame with 4 shelves. These are easy to put together yourself and can hold a max 400kg.
I have three of these shelves in my garage and they do keep everything off the ground and reasonably tidy. What I found with mine is that I ended up stacking lots into each shelf to use up the space which in some sections made it a little hard to pull things out when I needed them. I ended up using containers to store most of the storage which helped but then concealed much of the contents.
A slatwall garage solution is a great compliment to a new or old garage. Unlike garage shelving, slatwalls make it easy to access those garage items that you regularly. Whether it is tools or sporting equipment, having a garage solution that offers easy access is really important. In addition, slatwalls from StoreWALL offer a really nice finish to your garage walls. The weathered grey colour will blend in with your concrete driveway and provide a clean look and feel.
StoreWALL Slatwalls
StoreWALL slatwalls are complimented with a huge range of accessories to ensure you can maximise your garage walls. Whether it is baskets you need for sporting equipment or paint cans or hooks for tools or wood, StoreWALL offers it all. There are over 25 hooks to choose from catering for all of your small and large items.
Using shelving to store your tools doesn’t work. You can’t effectively hang your tools on a shelf. You can keep them all in a container but that doesn’t cater for all tools nor everything else usually kept in a garage.
I have one wall dedicated to tools and it holds several handsaws, a silicone gun, gardening saws, power cord extensions and several hammers. I also have several smaller shelves with cans used for degreasing as well as putties and several gardening oils. Storing these items in a big shelf is not really suitable.
Then you have sporting goods. We use tote bags and baskets for the soccer balls, training cones and the roller skates and blades. There is also another basket for all the other balls and racquets that have accumulated over the years.
Hanging Bikes
Bikes are a real challenge no matter the size of garage. I was a a friend’s the other day and saw that his 8m garage wall was used to hold 3 bikes (hung horizontally on hooks). The bikes looked like works of art on the wall. They were high enough not to interfere with anything else, but they really didn’t;’t maximise the garage wall. One wall for three bikes is not a great use of space. StoreWALL’s bike hooks allow you to hang your bikes both horizontally and vertically so that you can maximise your garage walls.
If you are keen on maximising your garage walls, do some research into slatwalls as a compliment to whatever shelving you might also require.