Hi friends! We’ve been busy organizing our garage for a couple weeks now, after being forced to replace our water heater in the basement utility room. The goal is to get the garage ready for parking both of our cars before winter comes around:

IMG_8681

During the last two weeks, we have created an organized paint storage, DIY-ed a ski rack, and added a mud-area in our garage. Things started to look really good in here! With a good momentum, last weekend, we started working on the final wall in our garage!

The eastern/ future workshop wall

IMG_7252

We took down the dry wall and some insulation here to make electrical panel upgrade easier. The old panel is now a junction box, which needs to be covered.

IMG_7250

During the electrical work, we asked for more electrical outlets along this wall. Our plan is to install work bench here, something like this:

Garage_3D_Backwall

Insulation and Cover

To finish this wall, Slav started by filling in the missing insulation:

IMG_9622

Then he covered the wall with 5mm plywood from Lowe’s:

IMG_9623

We have debated using drywall vs plywood here, and finally settled on using plywood for its durability and less finishing work. This plywood is actually pre-primed, but Slav wants some wood color in the garage, so we mounted the pre-primed side facing the insulation. Every sheet of plywood is 4′ x 8′, perfectly spans the width of three studs.

Slav cut openings fro electrical outlet before mounting them onto the wall:

IMG_9626

This eastern wall is 8’7″ in height. After covering the whole span of the wall, Slav started cutting small pieces to cover the gap on the top.

IMG_9632

After an afternoon of hard work, this is what our garage eastern wall now looks like. We have bought two work benches that fit the space. And our beloved chest freezer is on the right.

IMG_9635

Putting up storage shelves

While Slav was working on covering the wall, I worked on getting rid of this biggest pile of mess:

IMG_9194

Remember our paint storage on the Southern wall? This is the other half of the same wall. Not so hot:

IMG_9195

IMG_9216

We inherited from the previous owner this bench seat, which we believe, belongs to  his dodge truck. We kept it thinking that it could make a cool seating in the garage. But four month later, we have not sat on it once. Apparently we just do not hang out in the garage. The poor seat soon became a dump ground:

IMG_9197

We decided to let it go, and I was able to fit the cart and the tool cabinets at this spot:

IMG_9430

When we took down the eastern dry wall for electrical work, we took down a couple white shelves too. We got some simple brackets and Slav mounted them up.

IMG_9422

The board at the bottom is shorter to accommodate the height of the tool cabinet, when it fully opens:

IMG_9434

With the wall covered and all the storage boxes lifted off the floor, we are ready for setting up our workshop wall! Organization is my favorite activity – I can see some peaceful evenings here with a glass of red wine and music… It looked like we are somehow on track to finish the garage this month, as we had planned!