The Garage Cabinet Project

The first project I’m going to profile is the latest disrepair inflicted on my homestead: Garage Cabinets. 

The more home improvement I do, the clearer it has become that a well-organized and decently stocked workshop is a must.  We’ve been making do with a less-than ideal arrangement put in place by one of the previous owners of this fine, Southern California residence.  The original shelves were not actually shelves, but shipping crates sent to American Wholesale Hardware, Co.  I’m guessing that a previous owner of the house worked there, hence the elaborate shipping crate storage system along the walls.

The garage shelves BEFORE. Yikes.

 

Needless to say, this might have been fine for someone not using the garage as a workshop.  For me, they had to go.

So, the mission was to pull out all old crates and makeshift shelving and build in cabinets that were designed for the tools, supplies and other miscellaneous gack that accumulates in this spot in the garage. I optimistically assumed I could buy some prefab cabinets, pop them together, slap them up on the wall, and be done.  

Foolish girl.  I should have known nothing so easy had the remotest chance of occurring.  

I started my journey to proper garage shelves where all home improvement journeys start: trips to Home Depot, Lowe's, and OSH.  Everybody had WHITE melamine cabinets. The few cabinets that were proper garage-gray were really …..well, butch.  I wanted a garage workshop, not a NASCAR maintenance pit. Internet research revealed a whole lot more WHITE utility cabinets. And not even in sizes that made sense for what I wanted, so obviously we were going to build these cabinets from scratch. 

 

Once the decision had been made to build the garage cabinets custom, the project narrowed down to supplies.  Most of the big box home improvement stores had prefab sheets of 4’x8’, 16”x8’ and 12”x8' – even with shelf peg holes pre-drilled.  Except it was all in WHITE. Feh. 

Fast forward to the local specialty lumber store, where I’ve gone to ask about custom ordering gray melamine. They tell me that special ordering gray melamine would be prohibitively expensive; using a special cabinet paint tinted gray would be a better solution. And thus, it came to pass that the cabinets would be painted gray.  In my next post, we will move on to the scintillating topic of cabinet painting.