These clever garage storage ideas will help you make molehills out of the mountains of stuff piling up in your NoVA garage.

In Northern Virginia, many residents’ lifestyles developed around driving. That’s probably why we love our garages so much.

Besides being home to the cars, most people’s garages are a catchall workspace, storage space, and activity area. You’ll find anything and everything out there—but you might have to look for a while, maybe even crawl over a few things to get to what you want. That’s the problem with garages—they tend to attract clutter like streetlights attract moths.

If that sounds like your garage, you’re not alone. Luckily, at Closet America we have a few garage storage ideas up our sleeves that will help you make molehills out of the mountains of stuff piling up in your garage.

Garage Storage Ideas from the Experts

It’s tempting to look at all that miscellaneous, inconveniently scattered stuff in your garage and blame it on the size of the garage. Obviously, the problem is that it’s too small, right? In fact, size rarely matters at all—nine times out of ten, it’s the storage system that has room for improvement. Take a look at these ideas and consider how they might transform your garage space for the better.

1. Give the people what they want. Everyone in the family is likely to walk through the garage regularly. Some may have a tendency to leave things—like small, hard-edged toys—behind, perhaps exactly where you walk. Or perhaps those pegs in the wall beside the door to the house, the ones where you’re meant to hang coats and scarves, keep falling out when you’re not looking. If everyone is going to treat the space around the door as a faux mudroom, you may as well make them happy and put in some doorless lockers and shoe shelves, maybe even with a bench. It’ll keep everything orderly and contained in a small area, and it’ll look nice.

2. Work your way into a corner. Many people who use their garages as a workspace find it handy to place their workbench in a corner. By installing L-shaped custom cabinetry, you create an ample work surface. Beneath it, you can have made-to-measure drawers and adjustable shelves.  You can fit the walls above your work surface with slatwall, if you choose, or install cabinets or shelving, and again take advantage of space that is often underutilized.

3. Let everything have its own space. You can store items for a dozen different activities in your garage—that’s one of the reasons we love that space so much. But for the sake of everyone’s sanity, you need to set some boundaries. The golf balls and bocce balls should never intermingle, any more than the tulip bulbs and dog treats. To ensure this doesn’t happen, you need organization systems to give everything its own proper place. By choosing the shelves, baskets, and hangers that best accommodate your equipment, you can store everything compactly and discretely, and thereby avoid wasting hours of time digging through someone else’s important things (or, as you like to call it, clutter).

4. Scale the walls when you need more storage. When you are looking for storage space, there is no reason not to use every square inch of every wall. By providing lots of slatwall, you can place items you rarely use—holiday decorations, for example—way up high, near the ceiling, and use a stool or ladder to access them the one time a year when you need them. You can hang things on hooks, hang baskets to hold them, or put up shelves. If your garage, like many, is unfinished, you can even hang things from the rafters if you choose. Another option is to have racks installed to hang baskets from.

Designing a Successful Garage Storage System

You need to be ready for anything in your garage, from working on projects to long-term storage, and you probably have items of all sizes, shapes, and weights. You need storage solutions that are ready to handle the load, with a system fashioned out of tough, high-quality materials and good design principles. Some of the things you might look for in well-designed, high-quality garage storage solution include:

• LED lighting to help you see what’s in those dark corners

• Sturdy chrome baskets that will not warp or come apart

• Thermo-fused laminate finishes that are attractive and easy to clean

• Wall-mounted shelves that will hold up to 300 pounds

• Floor-standing units with built-in levelers for safety 

At Closet America, we have years of experience making garages in Northern Virginia more useful and inviting. We have the solutions to fit your needs. Our four-step process begins with a free design consultation with one of our experts, who can talk to you about your specific garage—its dimensions, your organizational needs. Our expert may have their own ideas and suggestions to offer you, and they will create an interactive 3D model with CAD technology so you can see what your future garage will look like. Once you have made a decision, we craft every piece we make by hand to your specifications using the highest quality engineering, and we install everything we make ourselves to ensure your complete satisfaction. 

Contact Closet America today to make an appointment with a design expert and find out how you can have a beautiful, well-organized garage that everyone will love.