Alas, poor Yorick! Hamlet may have had Daddy issues, but he really understood the importance of good bones. And make no bones about it- good structure is important to maintain organization. Watch this video for one of my favorite cures for bare-bones garages. That’s more space in your garage and you won’t have to work your fingers to the bone to get there.
Blooper alert! Good stuff at the end of this video. 😉
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdbones.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today is a windy, blustery, Spring day. I’m out here in my garage, and I want to talk to you about a common problem that I see in garages and sometimes in basements. And that’s what I call “boneless spaces. “ They have no skeleton, there’s no infrastructure of shelving or cabinets or anything to store items and, therefore, they end up around the periphery of the room, in stacks, and then they eventually creep into the middle of the space. And if we’re talking about a garage, very quickly that means that you cannot park your car there. So, I have a one-car garage in my new house here, and I really need to park my car in it. So I have a problem with, you know, no infrastructure. And this is how I solved it.
Overhead racks. This is one of the most elegant, brilliant, simple solutions I’ve ever found for a quick turn-around in a garage. I’ve done this with so many client projects, magazine projects, and my friends at saferacks.com are the ones who helped me out with this and have always helped me with my other projects too. And I love their storage units because they’re super strong and better, they have dealers all over the country. So you can find one on their web site, and then they will help you figure out the right configuration of shelving, and they will install it, which is super important. So each of these racks holds 600 pounds of stuff. And I certainly don’t want to be the one installing that if I’m going to have 600 pounds of stuff hanging over my car. So, that’s very important to me.
So, I wanted you to see the before pictures here in my little one-car garage, and now the after pictures. So what I got are two 4 X 8 units – and they have different sizes so you can get whatever works for your garage – but each of these with a two-foot drop from the ceiling becomes 64 cubic feet of storage space. So, because I have two, I have 128 cubic feet of storage space in this little garage that’s added on, up above, that’s not in my way. And I did a little price comparison. If you go to a storage unit facility and you get one of the smallest units, which is like 5 X 5, so it’s about 200 cubic feet, just a little bit more, you’re going to spend over $700 a year, depending on where you live, and this just pays for itself right away, not to mention the convenience of having all your stuff right here at your own house with the security issues and things being hauled around. It’s so much better to have it all right here.
So, I learned a few things from doing this, so I wanted to let you know what I learned. First of all, your installer probably knows this, but when you’re installing these, you want to think about who is the tallest member of your household, make sure you measure how tall these racks are going to be when they assign the drop from the ceiling and figure that out, because you want the tallest person in your family to be able to walk under these without having to duck. Very important when you’re taking out the garbage and stuff like that.
So the next thing I learned is that you might want to put labels on the bottom of your boxes, because there is a grid here and you can actually see up underneath through the grid. So it could be helpful for you to see the labels on the bottom, and that’s not something you typically would do, so it’s kind of a neat idea.
Also, if you’re worried about the stability of some of the stacks that you have here, you can actually stretch a bungee cord across the sides and they have places easily that you can hook the bungees on to. And that can give you a little bit more, you know, flexibility and stability. And the other thing that I really like is that you can get these little accessory hooks and you can hang ladders and bikes and extension cords, like you see here, and do a lot with this grid that’s hanging, you know, things can hang off the bottom of this grid. So there’s a lot you can do with these overhead racks. It sure does free up the space and now I can park my car in here, I’ve got holiday decorations and things way up out of the way, but easy for me to reach, and it’s a really elegant solution.
If you want to find out more, you can go see my friends at saferacks.com, and we will see you next time. May you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for where to store things that aren’t used often or how to save space and stay organized in the garage.
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