Finishing & Organization

So, thar’ she is!  Up on the wall and tarted up with snazzy handles (on sale at Lowe’s!) Cooler than any garage cabinet has a right to be.  Speaking of Lowe’s – who would have thought that they would have GREY peg board!   I stopped and stared in the aisle – it was like the heavens had opened up and ray of sunlight burst through. FINALLY!  Somebody understands my needs at a big box retailer.  (For the sake of brevity, I’ve left out a very long story of firing Home Depot and Lowe’s multiple times over the course of this project for failing to have shelves stocked with supplies I needed.  Basic supplies.  I can buy a Mexican Coke but you can’t stock 12” white melamine with pre-drilled holes at every store, Home Depot? What the hell is that? Sorry, done ranting….)

Grey f’in peg board!  Hot damn.

My New Garage Cabinets

Doors & Organizers

Because we kept to the 4’ height, we got two doors out of each 8’ melamine board. Your local big box retailer will have a little kit to set up your hinges and get them drilled correctly. Buy it.  You won’t be sorry.

I left the inside of the cabinet white to help with visibility.  We have plenty of lights on the work table, but it gets dim as you look upward, so the white helps bounce light out of the cabinet.  Under the cabinet, we put in an LED undercabinet light strip.  In our zeal to organize things, we even took advantage of unused real estate in the corner and turned it into shelving for drill batteries. 

The Pièce de résistance of my new garage cabinet is the bins. 

Where before there was chaos and madness, nothing could be found and we bought things twice because we couldn’t find the first one.  We never knew exactly what we had.  Then came the bins, and they changed…..everything.  

Really, when you come right down to it, it was always about the bins. You know that TV commercial where the couple asks the architect to design a house around a faucet?  Well, we built a cabinet around some bins.  It is the plain, honest truth.
 

Plastic Bins Now Organize the Garage Cabinets

So, knowing that our cabinet inside sections were around 22” deep, I needed to find bins that would maximize the depth of the cabinet.  I think we’ve established by now that I research things to death, no?  Anyway, finding companies who want to see you a wide variety of bins individually is not easy.  I found only one manufacturer that met my bin needs in terms of size, Quantum Storage Systems.  I ordered blue bins that were 14 ¾ deep, the fit perfectly on my 16” shelves.  I grabbed larger yellow bins for stuff that needed a bigger bin, like gardening gloves.  (Just because I know somebody is going to want to know this: www.randmh.com was one of the few companies I found who had a full range of bin sizes and would ship individually, rather than packs.)

All the sandpaper ended up being stored in a magazine holder, available at any office supply store.  Works great.

We also put plastic bumpers on the inside of all the doors so minimize damage to the cabinet over time.

The final phase of this project is the shelving to the side, the subject of the next post.