The Garage In The New House

My garage is not perfect, but I will share it anyway.

We made the garage huge! The spacing was the result of having small garages prior to this one. A double car garage places your cars too close together. I knew having kids would cause lots of dings in our car doors.  I also created this design when my dad was still living. We got a taste of the space needed with wheelchairs, scooters and walkers, that I planned for 3 feet between each garage door. I selected single garage doors instead of a double door so that I could space the cars further apart.

This allows the cars to be 7ft apart and no car doors touch each other. We can have both doors on the cars open and still not touch. I am most thankful for this decision!

I use the space in between the cars a lot to house my projects in process. But I try to keep the space clear so that I can enjoy the benefits of the wide space.

I also made sure I had space on the sides of the garage. Our last garage we were lucky to have enough space on the side to store our garbage container, but our neighbors were not so lucky. Our neighborhood does not like trash cans to be seen. Unfortunately, we can see our neighbor's, but you can’t see it from the main street. I understand some people not wanting their trash in the garage. I don’t mind at all. It is more convenient to take out the trash. So, I made sure the sides were deep enough to keep a trash can and a lawn mower.

Now, the back of the garage goes deep. I knew we’d need space to house my tools and my dad’s tools. We organized those spaces onto heavy duty shelves we bought from Costco. They are my favorite shelves.

I originally designed the deep space with intentions that we could tandem park two vehicles inside the garage. We ended up not making the space that deep.

 

We also weighed the option to put a smaller garage door on the opposite side of the garage so that we could access the lawnmower and equipment from the backyard easier. We nixed the idea for cost reasons, but I also wanted to have more wall space.

The extra space has been nice. When we built our cross, we didn’t think about storage. But we have a perfect place for it.

It actually serves as scooter storage for the boys. 

Not my preferred method, but it’s put to use!

The boys also have their tool benches out there. That has been the cutest thing. The boys love it! They will spend so much time out there “Building” things. It’s also a place I find many lost sippy cups!

The wagon has become a storage place for my scrap wood. The boys use it for their building sessions.

I’m back and forth on whether I should have done the garage flooring. During construction, our garage was used as storage for material. And even once the material was all used, we began using the garage as storage to start slowly moving things over. Mom’s townhouse was getting crowded! So, we never had an empty garage before moving. And now that there is a ton of things in there, I don’t want to move them out.

But with how dirty we get things in the garage, I’m not sure if I could stand getting the nice floor dirty. We have used the garage floor to spray paint on and residual paint has landed on the ground. 

We bought bike racks from Brookstone to make use of wall space.

We used the Rubbermaid Fast Track Rail system like we had inthe last house. You can hang the rails up and use whatever hooks you need.

On the wall closest to the house, we have the trash can and recycling cans so we can easily toss things in there. There is also a small can we put birdseed in to protect it from critters and a hamper for Mr. JCrew to toss his gym clothes in when he gets home. 

A tip I’d like to share is how we store our flag. Mr. JCrew bought this for me as a Christmas present our first year in the house. We only put it out on holiday’s, but when it is not on display, we store it in the garage. We eliminated the task for having to remove the flag from the pole, by hanging a bracket on the wall in the garage. We just move the flag pole from one bracket to the other. It makes it so much easier to display.

The latest addition to the garage is a clock. We had one out there, that was my mom's but it has since disappeared. I spend a lot of time in the garage with my projects, that it is nice to have a clock so I can keep track of time.

The garage isn’t a perfect, spotless, organized room in the house, but is a workable place that fits our needs. I have to reorganize it every once in a while, but I’m so thankful we designed enough space. We can fit so much “extra” stuff in there while it doesn’t have a home yet and still not feel crowded. Many of my projects land out there while the building phase is going on.

Garage Door Monitor

Over time, I have found products that make life so nice. I wanted to share my happiness with an add-on to our garage door opener.

We have the LiftMaster 829LM Garage Door Monitor and love it. I actually bought 3 because I thought we needed one per garage door, but I was able to sync all three garage doors to one monitor. We ended up using two of them and I have a third, if someone local wants to buy it from us!

Back to why we love it… It beeps when the garage door is opened or closed. It’s just a little chirp to let you know the door is being used. Our dogs and the kiddos know the sound of the chirp. It doesn’t bother the dogs, but they do go running to the door to see who is home. And the boys hear the chirp and also go running to the door to greet whomever is home.

It will also beep if the garage door is left open. The beep is about once every 60 seconds until the door is closed. You can close the garage door from the monitor and not have to go out to the garage to close it!

I mentioned that we bought 3, and are using 2. We don’t need two, but we keep one in Mom’s room so she can hear it. The other one is in our bedroom. We actually keep them under the bed, so we do not see them. They are loud enough that we still hear them when we are not in the bedrooms (but we keep our bedroom doors open.)

We discovered this add on when we bought a new garage door opener from Costco. When you buy anything from Costco, they add all these extras to the product. Sometimes you don’t need all those extras. With the Costco garage opener came the monitor, a smart control panel, a remote light control, and the internet gateway. I was afraid I would need to buy all of these extras for the new house, but I only bought the monitor and have the features I want. The smart control panel does have a neat feature called “time-to-close.” If you have an older model door opener, you can switch it out with the smart panel to get this capability. I love it! You can set it to automatically close your garage door in 1, 5, or 10 minutes. We never forget to close the garage door now! When researching the garage door openers, I made sure ours came with this capability. I love it!

I’m all about making things automatic. We have been so use to these features that they have become the norm in our house, and I forget to share their coolness. 

Amazon

Garage Doors Installed

We've had our garage doors ordered since April! I stopped by and picked out my doors on a day it snowed back in March.We finally got them installed last week.

The doors I originally wanted did not fit in the budget. They were beautiful carriage doors that would go with our tudor trim. Besides price being a down side, they came two-tone. I talked with three different companies and they all only offered them where they had to be painted two different colors. I wanted the whole door to be one color. One company did offer the single color option, but it came with a price.

Dream Doors!

I thought I had picked a simple design, but it was still three times more than I could spend. I chose a simple door that had some detail to it. I picked out hardware and was able to place it where I wanted.

I had six colors to choose from and I picked the brown. I really like it. Having it come in a color and not having to paint it will help with the lifetime warranty of no painting! Luckily, our doors are not facing South, so we won't have the sun fade them. The trim around it will be painted our medium color, Gargoyle by Benjamin Moore.

Many contractors always want to be the last to install their stuff. The cabinets want to come in after flooring. Garage doors want to be after painting. We just really wanted to get our doors up so that the material we were storing in the garage wouldn't be tempting to people to steal. We can manually lock the doors and the door that goes into the house from the garage now has a deadbolt so we can keep our material safe.

Before the garage doors could be installed, the trim carpenter had to install 2x4's around the openings.

We had some 2x12's left over on site, so he ripped those down and used them. They got that done early Tuesday morning and the garage door company came to install the doors.

They got two our of the three doors installed on Tuesday because of the late start. When they came back Wednesday, they hung the final door, the hardware and the openers.

Now I was picky about the garage door openers.I have a draft blog post I never finished back from September of 2013 about the new garage opener we installed at the old house. Little JCrew's room backed up to the garage, and we had a chain drive. Every time you opened the door, it could be heard in his room. We upgraded to Chamberlain's Whisper Quiet Belt drive and loved it. I don't necessarily need the quiet operation for the new house, but I did request one feature... timer-to-close! You can set the door to automatically close after you have accidentally left it open. It can be one minute, five or ten. I never had to worry if I left the door open. We also had a remote opener located on the outside of the door to punch in a code in case the door ever closed while I was outside doing yard work. I actually liked that it did that. If I was in the back yard mowing or on the side of the house, I didn't have an open garage tempting someone to come in while I was occupied out of sight.

So our new openers are not the super-dooper opener, but they do have this timer-to-close feature and I am really excited.

And I'm really excited I can lock up my material. One step at a time, we are getting there!

Door Threshold Fix

I’ve had a lot of little projects going on, and I finally have time to write about them.

First up, a little update to the threshold of the door that leads to the garage.

The way our house came, there was nothing under the threshold in the garage. I didn’t know there needed to be, but if you put your foot in just the right spot, it would sink a little. I wanted to find a pretty solution so that it wouldn’t become a problem in the future.

My sister-in-law had beautiful brick under her threshold in her garage. I have it under the threshold leading out to the back porch.

I took some extra brick I had from lining my flowerbeds and stuck them under the threshold.

It has sat like this for 3 years. The threshold is slanted, so the brick only fit in the middle and to the right, but not the left side. I knew I needed to cut them, but didn’t want to mess with cutting brick.

I then thought if I was going to cut brick, I might as well cut them in half to create the look of the brick outside.

It wasn’t until last month, that I decided to buy a piece of pressure-treated wood that I could cut and paint.

It’s just what I did. I painted it white to match the trim around the door.

Now it looks polished and complete. It has function and looks pretty.

Little JCrew helped of course. Wearing a bike helmet protected him from losing his balance.

The wood was $3 for an 8-foot piece. I had the saw and the paint, so this was an easy and cheap project.