Getting Into the Slav Zone – Ranch House Garage Tour

Welcome to the last tour to our ranch house! I should have asked Slav to write this last post, since garage is totally his zone. He was the one who requested two-car garages, and he is totally the master mind behind how we are gonna use it.

Without further ado, here is our garage:

Our garage is a little less than 18.5′ x 21.5′, a “compact” two-car garage. Since it is not over-sized, we decided that we would not use it as storage from the beginning. here are the plans we have for the garage:

A workshop and shelter for both cars

We want to be able to park both cars here – Denver gets snow and ice storms in winter and hail in spring, and we want to be able to protect our cars against bad weather. Slav also wants to be able to maintain our cars here, which means having plenty of space around a car when it is parked in the garage. Because of its size, there is not a lot of room on each side when we park two cars inside at the same time (you can see from the video how little space we have on each side of the garage door). That means that we cannot set up deep work benches or store bulky items on the side of the garage.

Limited by the width, the only space for a work bench in this garage is at the back. When we got our electrical work done, we asked our electrician to put in a series of outlets along the back wall:

We already had a chest freezer, which was settled in the corner of the garage. We then taped the floor to determine the size of the work bench:

The future work bench will be 3′ deep and 40″ tall, and run between the freezer and the garage door area. It will look something like this:

You can see the outlets right above the bench, the garage door to its left and the freezer to its right. The cylinder next to the freezer is Slav’s winter tires, and the rectangle block indicates the bench seating we inherited.

All the tools and the Shop-Vac will be stored underneath the work bench. For small tool storage, Slav got some pegboards from Habitat for Humanity for only $8 a pop (the small one is only $3)! They will be mounted above the workbench and rest of the wall will be covered by drywall.

A garage for work, not storage

The second plan we have for the garage is not to use as a storage. but rather delicate it to car work and DIYs. All of gardening stuff including our lawnmowers will be stored in the backyard shed, and we will try not to accumulate clothing or decor more than we can display.

Aside from the work bench and Slav’s tools, we plan to mount a couple narrow shelving along the right wall, directly under the garage door track. All our paint cans will be organized on it. In this way they will not longer occupy floor space, and it will be easier for us to see what color of the paint we have. When we need to paint something, we just need to put some drop clothes down on the floor and it will become a paint corner.

Create a functional mudroom for winter

The third important function of this garage, aside from parking two cars and tool/paint storage, is to serve as a mudroom. In winter, we will be driving in with snow gears with lots of dirt under our shoes, and we need an area to unload wet gears and muddy boots before entering the house. To use the least space to gain the most function, we mounted our shoes on the wall next to the door going into the kitchen, and put down a big outdoor mat in front of the step.

The wall space under the garage door track on the left will be dedicated to snowboards and skies.

Insulation and ceiling

As I told you in the video, the garage is mostly (but poorly) insulated on two sides, but not on the door nor the wall facing the kitchen. We will add insulation into the kitchen wall to make the house cooling in the summer, and patch the missing insulation on the back wall. We will also add some light insulation panels on the garage door and see how much it would help. The goal is to insulate the garage in the way that it can be comfortable with the help of a space heater in winter and a window AC in summer, without breaking our bank.

The last big project we would like to do is to vault the ceiling of the garage. Currently, there is no insulation above the garage ceiling. The current ceiling is just random sizes of dry wall taped together, which is weak and ready to fall on our heads. The lighting situation here is also terrible – all tube lighting with wires interconnected because they did not want to pay for installing light sockets on the ceiling! When the inspector came in to see the electrical work, he gave us a green light to take down ceiling in the garage because “it only makes it safer”, especially if we clean up the electrical system and install new lighting here. We think having a tall ceiling will make this compact-sized garage feel a lot bigger! It will be such a cool place for Slav to work on the cars and for me to DIY.

There you have it, our garage tour and plans. We need to take down the broken ceiling/attic ladder, add new sub-roof and insulation in between, add new lighting for the garage, put up pegboard/drywall the back wall, build a work bench for Slav, hang shelves on the right side for paint can storage, and hangers on the left wall for our winter gears. There are plenty work to do but getting the garage in good shape is something we both very excited about!