may 22, 2009: barren garage on move-in day

june 2009: dad wilt traveled down to carolina to work his painting magic on all four garage walls AND the ceiling. he painted it my favorite color: white. so fresh and so clean, clean.
summer 2009: garage was home to several home projects, including (but not limited to) spray painting, sanding, priming, scraping, antiquing, and cutting. ultimately, the garage had turned into a lovely dumping ground for all things not wanted in our house (refer to figure 1).
figure 1. a hot garage mess.

the past weekend, we worked on clearing out, throwing away, and organizing the garage. we’re quite pleased. although we’d like to wow you with this after:

we’re not quite there yet. give us a few more years to accumulate garage-worthy materials and we’ll upgrade into this mac-daddy of a garage storing system.
during the overhaul, we both claim the brain child of a modified, utalitarian, cheap mudroom to house our piles of shoes (especially less-than-fresh sneakers), hats, and coats that we use on a regular basis. all of those things usually pile up incredibly quickly in the basement and for some reason the shoe clutter quickly transfers into mail clutter, unfolded laundry clutter, and magazine clutter. we needed to stop the clutter problem BEFORE it entered the house.
we thought this blank slate may do the trick:

$25.00 and 10 minutes later, we have a place to hang our hats, jackets, and store our shoes:

my parents have an old remnant of carpet that we’re going to snatch on our next trip to wv to put down to “designate” the mudroom area to to help keep the dirt in the garage. updated pics to come.
lowe’s was having a sale on these storage shelves, which we snagged for $35.00 and is a perfect spot for almost everything in the garage, plus some pantry-worthy paper goods.

we tried to utilize the corners of the garage “nook” so there would be plenty of space to “drive & park” our bikes in between. it worked out nicely.

this shelving system only put us back $9.99 and came with 12 hooks that are remarkably strong enough to hold a tiller (far right). note: snow shovel is placed at the far left to channel the winter fairies to bring lots of snow to charlotte (snow days = no school).

so there you have it. we’d still like to install some shelving to get the christmas decorations off of the floor, but it’s not a priority at this moment. we feel like we have so much more space in the garage, which will hopefully allow us to dabble in our adulthood hobbies, including:
anton answering his life-long calling of a wood whisperer and whittling all sorts of goodies from his workbench

or
erin answering her life-long calling as mrs. green-thumb and dedicating an entire space that will hopefully look this this:

project breakdown:
5-tier shelf from lowe’s = 34.99
stainless steel coat rack from lowe’s = 7.99
4-tier shoe rack from walmart = 17.99
wall hooks from lowe’s = 9.99
knowing where things are without digging through endless piles of random crap: priceless