Happy Friday, friends and family! We are enjoying our first Colorado Fall here, which is gooooorgeous. The night temperature falls below freezing now, but we are able to stay cozy thanks to our new roof, furnace and tankless water heater. Interestingly, our garage did not get as cold as we thought it would be. We have not had any freeze in the garage.
Unlike our neighbors, who dread the soon-to-be winter, we are looking forward to it with open arms. That is why we moved here! An early snowfall a couple weeks ago really got our hopes up – we dragged our winter gear out of the storage to make sure that they are in good working order. However, with five snowboards, two pairs of skis, and many pairs of boots and snowshoes, our basement living room immediately became a winter gear dump ground. We need a ski/snowboarding storage badly.
Pick a Design
We searched up and down on the internet for ski/snowboard storage systems, and were surprised how expensive they are, especially given that the constructions are very simple – in the form of vertical or horizontal racks. One of the design which we both liked is this one. It offers a minimalist design, and it is flexible. Both side of the rack are independent from each other, so we can mount them with any distance in between, in order to accommodate the location of studs and the distance between bindings. Most importantly, the design is so simple that we can make it ourselves.
The sites selling it has shown the dimensions, and we found a good instruction video for building something similar:
Decide the Location
We picked the opposite wall to our paint storage for the ski rack. This is the northern wall of the garage, and living room and kitchen are behind this wall. Icleared everything away from the wall and removed all the nails on it:
I then taped out where we want the ski rack to be:
The rack will be mounted higher to allow some storage underneath. You can see from the photo that we have an air compressor, a power washer, a box fan, and our loyal shop-vac below the rack. This corner has its own outlet and faucet, connections needed for using these equipment. So it is convenience that we can connect any of them right at the spot.
As you can see, we planned for five shelves, which required us to compress the spacing between the dowels from 12″ to 10″. It should still allow us to take down and put up snowboard with ease. We also cut down the length of the dowels from 16″ to 14″ to make the rack narrower.
Just to throw it out there, we also liked the design showing in the video below, and this video did a great job explaining how to build it. If we had more space in the garage, or we were building this rack for a cabin, we would have chosen this design.
D.I.Y Ski Rack
Slav started with a couple 2″x 4″s and some 1 1/8″ dowels and followed the video instruction. We do not have fancy wood-working tools like the guy in the video does, but with a basic drill, a saw, and some wood glue, Slav still did a decent job:
He mounted the ski rack on the studs with 2’8″ in between, a perfect distance between his snowboarding bindings.
This is what it looks like when they are loaded:
For boots, Slav mounted a 1″ x 8′ x 1″ horizontal board on top. It is nice to see every gear polished up and ready to go!
Creating a “Mud-area” on the Northern Wall
Another thing we really need is to create a “mud-area” in the garage, so we can leave our winter shoes out of the kitchen. We’ve had these hanging shoe organizers from Real Simple for years and like them. So Slav hung them next to the kitchen door. He also hung a pair of vintage skis for keys and coats. Along with a big floor mat, This half of the northern wall became a “mud-area”:
I wish for a real mudroom someday, but for now, we are just thrilled to have this setup so we can keep our kitchen clean. We squeezed out the last bit of storage by mounting another 1″ x 8′ x 1″ horizontal board on top of the mud-area for fishing and camping gears.
After many big renovation projects, a simple DIY and some organization makes me feel really good. It is relaxing and energizing. It feels like a break. We are spending rest of the week nights next to our fire pit and with some cocktails, and this weekend, we will start working on the last wall in our garage!
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