Steps of the TRANSFORMATION
- Unfinished walls and floors
- Unrealized space in peaked ceiling
- Only room for one of two cars
- Cluttered
- Room for both cars, two adult bikes and three children’s bikes
- Clean, finished look and better organization
- Better lighting
- Optimized ceiling storage capacity for seasonal decorations, tires and camping gear by building a reinforced, overhead platform.
- Installed unique horizontal bike lift to clear additional wall and floor space.
- Created wall storage with grey slatwall installed from floor to ceiling and cleared area for storage and easy access to garbage and recycling bins.
- Ensured “finished” look by repairing floor cracks and installing polyaspartic coating on floor and painting walls and trim in complementary colours.
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1 week
- $9,000
2 Car Garage – Beaches – TRANSFORMATION
Click on each Thumbnail to view an animation of our space transformation.
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Hydraulic Car Lift
Wall Organization Systems
Water Station
Rick invested a significant amount of time up front to ask questions on my needs from a use and function perspective, took pictures of the garage and came back with a very thoughtful approach to my storage needs including a place to hang the kids wagon, the need to store five bikes for the entire family and winter tires, and offered a number of custom adjustments and organized everything for me on completion to ensure it met the needs from the original discussion.
In a scenario many families will be familiar with, an urban, professional couple with three young children needed to organize and maximize their cluttered, unfinished garage to make room for two cars, five bikes, sports equipment and various garden and outdoor accessories.
When the kids were smaller, it was easier to accommodate both cars, but with the kids getting older, their sports gear was starting to take up more space in the garage relegating one of the cars to the driveway. Improving overall safety was also a key consideration to ensure no one tripped over things left lying around. The lighting was dim and inadequate adding to the difficulty of finding things or putting them back in the right place.
Parking two cars in the garage while creating accessible storage for all the bikes led me to source a unique, motorized, horizontal bike lift that, with the push of a button, could suspend the two adult bikes from the ceiling offering a convenient, effortless way to maximize floor space. Like many homes in The Beaches, the garage was located in a laneway behind the house and had a nine-foot, peaked ceiling, offering an opportunity to further maximize the unused space. In addition to installing the bike lift, I reinforced the ceiling trusses and built a side wall, overhead storage platform to create an ideal spot for tires, camping gear and seasonal decorations that only need to be accessed occasionally. Slatwall with Camlock hooks created specific zones for hanging rakes, shovels and outdoor equipment including the kid’s bikes and wagon.
With citywide recycling and green bin programs the norm, it’s good to have a designated area in the garage since trash items should never be stored in the basement. In this transformation, a growing family also meant more weekly garbage so an area was cleared on the rear wall to accommodate the city-issued larger-sized bins.
To improve the overall aesthetics and utility of the garage, I repaired the floor cracks and installed a low-VOC polyaspartic coating, which was colour matched to the slatwall and door and trim paint to unify the look. For better lighting, I installed a 6-bulb T8 fluorescent ceiling fixture, which provides a bright, uniform light while using minimal electricity.
