Steps of the TRANSFORMATION
Current Garage Situation:
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Our clients are a couple with two kids in their late teens. While they didn’t have a lot of clutter, the garage didn’t reflect the interior of the house, either aesthetically or organizationally.
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They live in a well-established neighbourhood in North York with a two-car garage that was 19 feet wide, twenty feet deep and nine feet high.
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One advantage is that they had a 30 inch return on the left side. The garage had already been finished with drywall, but the concrete floor was heavily pitted and stained.
Customer Needs:
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Our clients had never parked both of their cards in the garage. The issue wasn’t that they had too much stuff, but what they had was disorganized.
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Among the equipment that they wanted to store were bikes, recycling containers, a thule, some home maintenance tools, and water jugs. They also wanted to add a work bench. Disorganized space but not a lot of stuff.
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Customer had NEVER parked two cars in garage.
Garage TailorsGarage Solution:
We created a custom design to accommodate customer needs including slatwall, organization accessories, overhead storage and matching the slatwall and flooring to complement the external stone of the home.
Flooring:
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Installed “polyaspartic” floor to improve visual appeal, reduce dust, and facilitate easier cleaning and maintenance.
Time to Complete:
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2 days
Approximate Cost:
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$5,000
Custom Work:
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We repositioned their central vacuum cleaner to accommodate a work station as there was not enough space on the left hand side of the garage. The workbench is an L shape which included a storage shelf to fully utilize available space.
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We installed a 10 foot long row of slatwall on left wall starting at front of garage and extending to the workstation to accommodate bike.
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Along the right wall, we installed a 19 foot row of slatwall to accommodate home maintenance tools.
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We also used slatwall above the work station for hand tools, shelves for liquids and gardning supplies.
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We used a 4’x 8’ steel overhead storage solution attached to ceiling joists and lowered to allow head room space to walk underneath that would accommodate their thule and water jugs.
2 Car Garage – North York
Workstation
Garage Flooring
Left Wall
Customer Comments:
We have lived in our home for several years but have never fully utilized the space available in our garage, nor were we happy with the untidy floor. Rick designed our space to allow us to park both cars while still being able to have easy access to our bikes and tools. His custom design was respectful of our budget and included a simple workbench and work station. This was made possible by rerouting our central vacuum completely across to the other side of the garage where there was dead space. Our new floor looks beautiful and we no longer have to keep 1 car outside!
Transformation Story:
After spending time and money to renovate all the rooms in your house, you don’t want your garage to feel like an afterthought. Combine a lack of aesthetic appeal with no organization system and you’re ready for a garage transformation. This is the situation I faced with some recent clients.
2 Car Garage – North York
Often when I meet with new clients, they are at their wit’s end with the clutter in their garage, but that wasn’t the case here. This professional couple with two teenagers simply wanted their garage to reflect the rest of the house. It had to function according to their needs and look good.
The rest of the house had been renovated and now they wanted to transform their garage.
Our goal was to organize the stuff they had, allowing for two cars to be easily parked inside, build a work bench and install a floor. They could have done more, but the budget wasn’t a blank cheque.
The garage measures nineteen feet wide, twenty feet deep and nine feet high, which allowed for what they wanted to do, which appeared to be simple and straight-forward.
The first thing we did was move the central vacuum cleaner from the left side to the right to make space for the work bench, rerouting the tubing and piping across the top and bottom. This is where we ran into the first glitch. We discovered that the original installation for the central vac was done incorrectly. The connection inside the wall was very loose. When we started moving pipes, the connection came loose inside the wall. Luckily, we were able to access and fix the problem through the garage wall.
Once the vacuum unit was moved, we had room for an L-shaped workbench with a storage shelf. The workbench was installed on the left side of the garage because there was a 30 inch return on that side.
We then needed to find storage for bikes, tools and garbage cans. In order to figure out where best to store these items, we had to know how the couple parked so that the driver’s side doors were protected.
Because of the large return on the left side, it made sense to store the bikes there. We installed one row of slatwall to hang the bikes on. Closer to the garage door are the large recycling and garbage bins, stored for easy access.
Along the back of the garage are shelves for storage as well as some slatwall and hooks for their organics containers. To accommodate their thule and water jugs, we put in some overhead racks from the ceiling.
On the right hand side of the garage, there was much less of a return so we installed slatwall and hooks for garden tools, shovels and ladders because they lay flatter against wall.
A lot of thought went into the aesthetics. Because the exterior of the house is a natural stone in beiges and browns, the floor has a Bristol finish with tan, white, blue and grey flakes. The slatwall is grey to pick up the grey in the floor.
This project took just two days and cost approximately $5,000.
