Organise Your Garage

Before you start organising your garage it's a good idea to paint the walls and ceiling to stop brick and plaster dust accumulating. This will take a few coats and the bare walls may need priming first with a thinned paint / water mixture.

Rollers are great for the ceiling but you'll need a masonry brush as well for the walls.

Once you've done the walls, empty the garage completely so that you can start to seal the floor.

You'd better pick a nice dry day however as your driveway is going to get a bit cluttered. Even better, try to have a few nice days and nice nights because.....

... when sealing garage floors like this be warned, the fumes continue to be given off for a considerable period and garage ceilings often have gaps around the edges.

We had to evacuate the bedroom above for 2 nights and leave the garage door open for a week.

Once done however you'll have no more concrete dust coating everything in sight.

Garage walls are the most valuable space you have in your garage. Shelves are great, but if you really want to maximise your space why not try building a wall unit.

All you need is some cheap block board, or the equivalent, batons, a saw, plenty of right angle brackets and screws.

You're not trying to build furniture, just something better than shelves.

We cut out wood to size using a power saw and portable workbench but you can just as easily use planks and any good DIY store will cut them to the right lengths for you.

It's a very good idea to use a powered screwdriver unless you are trying to develop wrist muscles like Arnie and callouses like leather.

Notice the bottom cunning hatches. Just cut a hole in the wood and put hinges on one side and a catch on the other, easy!

The wood will be a bit rough and ready to look at unless you've splashed out on pine and really taken care in construction. If you're like us and used very cheap materials thrown up with reckless abandon, a coat or two of paint will improve the appearance significantly.

Don't forget to wear your mask!

The finished product. Construction time, one day of hard work followed by a couple of short painting sessions.

All we need to do now is to fill the shelves and put the garage contents back in place....

Paint and noxious substances in the bottom cupboards everything else on its own boxed shelf.

Old scraps of carpet and rugs recycled from the rest of the house mean that you can wander through the garage in bare feet and vacuum it like any other room.