A fast, efficient way to make your garage the place to be and do By Bruce W. Smith When we moved in to our new home a decade ago, the garage was spacious with room to park two vehicles and clean counters around the perimeter to tinker and do minor repairs when the urge or need arose. Unfortunately, that has changed over the years. Like many of our beltlines, the lean, mean
garage of 10 years ago is now mysteriously bulging at the seams, unsightly
and unkept. The part of our home supposed to be housing our second largest
purchase—a vehicle—is littered with piles of items that have migrated
there over the years, turning the garage into something more akin to a
rummage sale warehouse.
We can still get our vehicles into the garage by carefully navigating our way between gardening tools, fishing gear, tool boxes, home repair supplies, and an assortment of other odds and ends stacked in unsightly piles. Call it that mid-life crisis or the traditional millennial garage cleaning, it was a time for change—a big change. Like many of today’s Baby Boomers, our garage needed a make-over. Fortunately, Sears new Craftsman Garage Storage Solutions offers a whole line of components to transform the nightmare garage to the garage of dreams where order reigns instead of chaos. Sears has really expanded the shop/garage/DIYer offerings in the Craftsman line. Walk into any Sears store (or log in to their e-site www.craftsman.com and type in “garage storage”) and you can literally purchase everything you need to give a garage a complete face-lift—from tile flooring and cabinets to tools and workbenches, and everything in between.
The most difficult task of a garage make-over is the initial sorting and cleaning. Years of using the garage to store all of that odd shaped stuff you weren’t quite sure what to do with inside the house has resulted in a garage stuffed with an assortment of items that wouldn’t net a couple of hundred dollars in a garage sale. Here’s how we handled that: 1) if an item hasn’t been used in the last three years, sell it or put in the garbage can, and 2) items deemed fit to stay should be sorted into categories and moved to the center of the garage. As for the make-over, we began in one back corner and moving along one side to the front, we picked, pushed, pulled, lifted, and tossed our way to the open garage door. The resulting junk (garage sale?) pile was both depressing and liberating. Once the floor was liberated from the accumulation of “stuff,” we spackled and sanded the dings, scrapes, and gouges every garage wall gets over time. Then we hit the walls with mild soap, Trisodium Phosphate (TSP), and sponges. TSP has been used by painters for decades as a heavy-duty degreaser and all purpose cleaner. Washing wall surfaces prior to painting helps insure a good clean "bite" for the new coats of paint. Then we picked up a gallon of white, high-grade, semi-gloss exterior (garage walls are subject to moisture from the open door) acrylic and painted. It’s amazing what painting, alone does to spruce up a garage. Sorting, cleaning, and painting done, it was time to tackle the bigger and more dramatic upgrades—the installation of the Craftsman plastic garage tile flooring, metal wall cabinets, floor storage lockers, work bench and under-counter roll-away tool centers.
One of the really cool garage improvement items Craftsman offers is tile flooring. They enlisted renowned all-weather flooring manufacturer, Sport Court International, to make special “diamond plate” high-density plastic floor tiles embedded with the Craftsman logo. Sport Court tile, which is used in NCAA basketball, volleyball, roller hockey, and numerous other sporting venues around the country, indoors and out, is made from high-impact interlocking polypropylene copolymers with 676 reinforced support legs. They literally snap together to instantly turn any garage floor into a showroom. One person can tile a garage floor in a couple hours, and if you have a helper, like I did, it goes even quicker. Tiles that need trimming to fit cut easily with a carbide-tipped blade. We used our trusty Craftsman table saw and 19.2V cordless trim saw to make them fit around the garage steps into the house and around the garage door framework The tiles, which are resistant to chemicals commonly found in a garage, are very easy to keep clean. Another benefit of these tiles is should you decide to move, you can take your garage floor with you and put it in the next one. Just unsnap and pack. Sears/Craftsman offers these heavy duty tiles in black, red, gray, and gray open mesh style. Price is about $2.60/sq.ft, or $55/box of 20 foot-square tiles. Our garage, which measures 20’x22’, required 20 boxes, mixed evenly between black and grey for a checkerboard design—and enough of the grey mesh style to serve as drain tracks when parking our SUV and car. UTIMATE STORAGE
SOLUTIONS Finding a good storage solution is the key to any garage make-over. In this instance we needed storage for garden, automotive, boating, camping and fishing-related activities. We also needed a lot more storage space than was afforded by the hodge-podge of cheap pressed wood lockers and cabinets that had been removed from the garage. The remedy for our garage storage solution came in three forms—all metal: Craftsman wall cabinets; Craftsman floor lockers; and Craftsman mobile storage cabinets. “For years, mechanics have organized tools in the drawers of Craftsman tool chests and roll-aways, Says Sears Bill Masterson. “Today, Craftsman storage options have expanded with a comprehensive line of high-quality metal storage solutions designed to help homeowners get organized. What is even better is homeowners can start with an entire system or build upon it, one piece at a time, as funds and needs arise. For example, Craftsman offers homeowners dedicated workbench “stations” designed to fill a 5-ft., 8-ft. 12-ft or a 16-ft. wall, which are perfect for any garage make-over. We needed a 5-foot workbench, with its metal pegboard frame, for storing our frequently used tools—and to compliment our garage’s existing counters. In addition, we added two wall cabinets designed to mount right to the workbench backwall. In addition, we selected two mobile roll-away cabinets because they fit beneath the workbench and our existing counters. These nice roll-aways will also serve as mobile satellite workstations when working on a motorcycle, ATV, boat, or one of our vehicles. Three more wall cabinets and a trio of vertical cabinet lockers, with and without interior shelving, rounded out the storage solution for our project.
All of the Craftsman garage storage components are premium quality. They include “zero- clearance” radius doors that allow cabinets to rest flush against a wall or adjacent to another storage unit without interference. They also feature heavy-duty tubular steel frames on the tops and bottoms to make them very rigid. The mobile roll-away cabinets have reversible worktops (MDF board with galvanized steel on reverse side) and exclusive I-Frame® construction, which is stronger than the flat side construction on standard Craftsman cabinets. Not that handy with building cabinets? Don’t worry--these cabinets and lockers take a minimal amount of assembly, and what is needed is cleary speeled out in the instructions. All one needs to mount the wall cabinets is a second pair of hands to lift them in place—the cabinets actually hang from special brackets anchored to the studs behind the garage walls. FINAL ADDITIONS Flooring down and cabinets set in place, the finishing touches to our garage re-do centered on a few basic garage necessities; all Craftsman, of course. We set a 12-volt, 30-gallon air compressor
into an existing nook, mounted the really handy shop vac under a wall
cabinet, and placed a bench grinder work station in the center of the new
workbench. A hand-me-down vise was replaced with a new version, and we
replaced the aging chain-driven overhead garage door opener with a
state-of-the-art belt-drive model.
What a difference the most basic of tools make. These Craftsman products make the garage instantly functional for multi-tasking within the home environment. Having compressed air, the ability to vacuum or blow away debris, a vise, and grinder workstation fill many different needs that weren’t available before. ONE LAST TAKE Our garage was not near the disaster zone seen in many cases throughout the Heartland, yet it is remarkable how much more inviting and beautiful it became with the upgrades and the weekend it took to do the work. In fact, one of the biggest bonuses of such a remodel is that it transforms any garage into more than just a place to keep vehicles out of the elements—the garage becomes more like a big den where the tinkerer, the do-it-yourselfer, the angler, the home mechanic, or the gardener can find peaceful solitude. Instead of wanting to quickly exit the garage, now I’m finding excuses to be in there working on this or that—or just plain puttering around. In short, now our garage really is a place to be and do.—Bruce W. Smith |
TAKING
BACK YOUR GARAGE 
SPRING
CLEANING
FLOOR
PLAY
The
stand-alone lockers would see duty housing bulky items and store
everything from golf clubs, floor jack, jack stands, fishing tackle, oils
and lubricants, and a number of other items that were always laying out in
the open. 