Not too many reasons to take pictures of our garage, so this is the best I can do for ‘before’ photos. These were taken the day we got the keys to the house.

This first photo is taken from the far side of the garage looking back at the house. That’s the little nasty workshop nook on the right and the door into the house on the left.

A little closer look at the workshop nook. It was pretty bad, but the nook area was a nice touch. Not too many houses in the neighborhood have that.

I’m not a garage guy. I don’t do much work. I don’t fix things. I don’t touch the cars. The thing is, I can do shit (good enough, at least… or fake my way through it) and my wife is often impressed. I mean, I had some tools and stuff. The act of buying the house made these skills more necessary and our collection of ‘garage stuff’ grow. We just kind of kept stacking things in the garage with no rhyme or reason. I hated the nook. It was dirty and broken and icky. We worked around it rather than with it for over a year.

Then last month on a particularly slow day in early April (right after Easter, I think) I decided that with things warming up and many projects needing done, that I was going to just start ripping shit apart in the garage and see where I ended up. I cleared out the crappy old cabinets and patched all the holes and stuff in the wall. As of April 7th, this is what I had:

I wanted to keep it as simple and cheap as possible, but still do something useable and nice enough. I started with a coat of paint. The same color that’s in the office. Yes, it’s orange-y. It looks really orange until you put something orange next to it and then you realize it’s not nearly as orange as it seemed. Technically, Behr calls it copper. On the 10th I had this:

Oddly enough, that same week my wife scored a bunch of stuff from the hotel. They were finishing up a huge renovation and there were a lot of old items that were no longer needed. She snagged me two cabinets and a little basket/drawer/storage unit thingy. I started to lay out my area:

The next few days I got pulled away as we totally stripped and restained and sealed the deck. It took a bit longer than expected and it was only over those few days that I learned we have almost 450 sqaure feet of deck space. What a pain in the ass. But it looked 1000 times better:

When I got back into the garage I went to work on the door leading outside. I painted both the door and the trim and put new hardware on the door. I used paint we had from other areas of the house and scored the bronze hardware on the bargain rack at Home Depot for under $30. The end result was vastly superior to the white door, white trim, brass hardware combo that was there before:

I also started paining the cabinets (this time with a paint sample we got a few weeks before when considering colors for the laundry room):

I finished the job with the colors from the door and swapped out the plugs and switches with sleek black rocker swtiches and flat, flush plugs and diamond plate covers (look closely). This cost less than $20 – mostly for the diamond plate covers:

Next up was the single biggest purchase of the entire redeux. I needed a topper to create a workbench with the cabinets and figured rather than some specialty thing, I’d just swing by Lowes and pick upa stock piece of laminate countertop, cut it to size and install it. It cost under $100 for an 8 foot piece and an endcap. Oh yeah, that “W” floormat was a christmas gift that we hadn’t had a place for previously:

I wanted a pegboard or something, but I wanted to stay reasonable in terms of cost and I absolutely hate that fiberboard crap that all the stores stock. I wanted something different. After some research I score this clear pegboard for $42 and did a fun Bowser graphic behind it with a piece that no longer had a place in my son’s room since we moved, but I had held on to for some reason:

I new I needed a little more space for stuff than I had and the garage is pretty tall. Seemed like an obvious choice to score a couple of 1×12′s and bracket them up high as shelves. Wood and brackets ran around $30.

I started getting all my crap situated and things started coming together:

At that point, my wife was so motivated by how much better the little nook looked that she said, lets just finish the entire garage. We got rid of the white and went with the khaki/beige color I put on the cabinet doors. I did the attic door and house entry door in the same dark brown/light brown combo as the door leading outside. We had a bunch of shelving from the hotel renovation that didnt quite go together in any useable way, so we picked up some pieces on our own that matched and put together a unit that spanned along the back wall of the garage. We got tools hung up along the far wall, I painted and frosted the windows and still had room for the kids’ bikes and the lawn mower. The almost finished project:

(click for a larger version of that photo)

The total cost to us ended up being right around $300 thanks to using so much “found” stuff to get it done. I still need to get a hook to hang the ladder, pour cement steps and lose the wood ones and put bronze hardware on the door leading into the house. Overall we’re very happy with the results of something put together basically on a whim, a month’s time and a couple hundred bucks.

Before and After: