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My garage can fit my car. I claim that as a personal victory, considering so many people have to park in their driveway. What I can’t claim is any type of rhyme or reason to the areas surrounding my car. They’re a ridiculous mess. That’s why I dedicated the weekend to getting one wall of my garage organized. There are only three walls in a garage. One weekend, one wall? I can be done in less than a month! Plenty of times to get everything sorted out before summer and all of it’s celebrations fully kick into gear!
We start with the humble garage wall. And I’m going to tell you just how humble this wall truly was before we got started. It was unpainted. Unstable stacks of all kinds of mess were piled in front of it. And spiders. There were SO many spiders. Stack things willy-nilly in your garage corners and don’t touch them for a few years and suddenly spiders think it’s their personal resort complex. Umm…no. I don’t do spiders. That made is surprisingly easy to toss some things to the curb that I might have otherwise kept. When you have to decide if it’s worth cleaning off spider babies, you purge like there’s no tomorrow.
So the spiders were given the eviction notice and the walls were painted. After that, it was time to mount some storage solutions on the wall to utilize the vertical space. Also, without things stacked on the floor, hopefully those spiders will move on to a more hospitable environment.
I installed a Rubbermaid® FastTrack® Hang Rail for some of the bulkier items. You’ll need to purchase one hardware pack for each 48″ section of rail. The hardware pack includes heavy duty screws and anchors to attach the steel rail to the wall. Locate your studs, first, to get the maximum load bearing potential from your rail. After that level, mark, drill and install your rail.
Once it’s up, the cover snaps slips into place. The instructions come with recommended heights, but I just held my arm up at what I considered a comfortable height and installed it there. And just ignore the holes from when I was attempting to find the studs. That’s what spackle is for… And did I mention I did this all by myself? Yes, that’s right. Just me.
The hard part is deciding which accessories you want for your rail. The easy part is snapping the accessories on and off, making it possible to mix things up as needed. And this baby is tough. It can hold 1,750 pounds!
To corral my smaller tools, I installed two FastTrack® Wall Panels. This, for the record, really is a two person job. But because my spider wrangling took much longer than I expected, I was putting these up in the middle of the night, solo. In theory, someone would hold the panels for you, while you leveled, drilled pilot holes, then installed the screws. In reality, I found something the perfect height to hold the first panel up for me while I drilled and screwed. Once you get it started, it’s easy as pie. Actually, easier. Pie can by tricky.
Just like with the hang rails, you’ll want to purchase the wall panel hardware pack that includes heavy duty screws for installation. You’ll also want to make sure you’re screwing into the studs to ensure maximum weight capacity. Look closely and you can see my stud lines still there. That’s because I’m hoping to install at least two more panels down the road.
There are a wide variety of accessories available, but I really liked the hardware trays. Which you can probably tell based on the fact that I bought three of them.
I also added a place specifically for my 101 cans of spray paint by up-cycling an old shoe organizer. I don’t mind saying, I’m feeling pretty genius with this solution.
So I’ve got one wall down, just two more to go. My goal: full garage organization by the 4th of July! I can totally do that, right? You know, unless we run into another spider situation. *shudder*
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You can find the array of FastTrack organization options available at The Home Depot!