Inexpensive Garage Storage Ideas That Will Help You Reclaim Your Garage

Looking At Garage Storage Ideas

If you’ve recently begun to wonder whether you could make more economical use of the space in your garage, a little Googling will reveal no shortage of garage storage ideas, some of which can help you store four or five times as much stuff in your garage without knocking down walls or blowing out the ceiling. Sounds absurd, right? Well, read on for an outline of some of the best garage storage ideas to come out of the realm of the DIY and into commercial applications in the past few years.

Considering The Basics

Now, of course, when you’re talking about storage solutions, you really should consider the basics first.

  • There’s no reason to resort to outlandish garage storage ideas if you have such a small amount of stuff that it can be easily handled with the addition of a few basic metal storage cabinets and some shelving.

  • In fact, installing cantilevered shelving could be one of the best things you ever do to add to the storage space in your garage and, if done using the right carpentry methods (anybody who doesn’t suggest you use a lot of wood glue doesn’t know what they’re talking about), should also give you some of the sturdiest, most long-lived fixtures in your home, capable of taking the weight of a grown man climbing up them.

  • This is an important consideration when you have kids in the house, who, as every mother since the Neolithic era has become painfully aware, are apt to climb up just about anything, even if the edifice of choice happens to be a fragile china cabinet or badly balanced shelving unit.

Out-Of-The-Box Garage Storage Ideas

But if you’ve got your shelves packed tight and, like the vast majority of Americans these days, you’re still having trouble even fitting your cars in the garage, then perhaps it is time to start looking at some more out-of-the-box garage storage ideas. Now, such ideas can still be inexpensive.

  • The new systems being touted by companies like MonsterRax and Rubbermaid are just that – cheap, and tough as nails.

  • Essentially, they’re just racks, ranging from six to twelve inches high that fit onto studs on your wall.

  • In the case of prefab walls, these studs will be driven all the way through the wall, whereas with ordinary masonry they’ll just be driven deep into the brick.

  • Either way, the resulting system works tremendously. This, say the designers, is primarily due to the way that the weight placed on the rack is spread out across the entire wall.

Enter into any garage that utilizes this most effective of garage storage ideas and you’re likely to laugh in surprise. Using the various hooks, bins, baskets and other fittings that the Rubbermaid and MonsterRax systems come with, people can hang most anything from their walls –

  • bicycles
  • wheelbarrows
  • lawnmowers
  • ping-pong tables
  • golf bags
  • sledgehammers

along with smaller items like power tools, wrenches and accessories, which benefit tremendously from the easy visibility these wall-racking systems give them, allowing you to find them in seconds whereas before you’d have needed to rifle through tool boxes or crates for minutes at a time.

Overhead Pulley Storage Systems

As if the space-saving magic of the various racking systems weren’t enough, people have also started to use the extra space available overhead with overhead pulley storage systems, which allow you to raise platforms bedecked in whatever you care to put on them to within inches of the ceiling.

  • These generally require you to hang them from joists or rafters in the roof of your garage, so may be a little difficult to install if you’re working with a garage with a solid concrete ceiling.

  • Assuming you manage to deal with that problem, though, they’re ideal, allowing you to rise or lower them quickly to hide or retrieve their contents – and many of them can deal with loads of up to three hundred pounds.

More heavy duty options, which attach to the ceiling via steel struts, while they are likely to require professional installation, can often hold over five hundred pounds, making installing one among the best garage storage ideas for anyone with a big pile of stuff to get out of the way.