Drive through any neighborhood built after the 1980s in middle Tennessee on a nice summer day, and you’ll see Drive through any neighborhood built after the 1980s in middle Tennessee on a nice summer day, and you’ll see a lot of open garage doors. Instead of vehicles parked inside, you’ll spy cluttered workshops, piles of boxes, and mountains of unorganized stuff. Remind you of anyone you know?
Our winters in the Nashville area may be mild, but there are plenty of other reasons you might want to park your vehicle(s) in your garage:
- Incoming severe weather
- Avoid vehicle break-ins (a common occurrence in Davidson and surrounding counties)
- Keeping a clean vehicle clean (no more pollen, bird poop, rain splatter)
- Opening up driveway space for guest parking or play space for kids
- Avoiding those early morning frost-scraping sessions in winter
- Protecting your vehicle’s paint, interior, and tires from UV radiation
- Fewer steps to bring in the groceries
At Garage Envy, we believe that custom wall-mounted wood shelving is the best way to open up garage floor space, but we offer a range of ways to do that, combining shelving with other solutions like slat walls and lifts.
Here’s a breakdown of our go-to moves for reclaiming your garage floor for what it was intended for: sheltering your vehicles.
Perimeter Shelving Above the Garage Door
When a garage has 4 – 8 ft of headspace above the rails of the garage doors (as most modern garages do), you can mount shelving to the walls above the rails on both sides and above the doors.
We like to support these with braces where we can, and then provide additional support by stringing cables from ceiling joists to anchor points on the shelving. Just make sure the bracing clears the height of your vehicle and allows a clear path for a person to walk alongside it. This often requires cutting the metal hanging from the ceiling that supports your garage door rails. We just fabricate a new brace that fits snugly under the shelving.
Say hello to hundreds of pounds and dozens of square feet of new storage, and wide open vehicle bays!
Motorized Platform Lifts on the Ceiling
If a garage has a high enough ceiling (usually 10 ft is good enough), motorized platform lifts can be a great way to provide up to 300 lbs. and 32 square feet of additional storage.
Our system mounts four synchronized motors on rails bolted into ceiling joists. Each motor has heavy duty cable that connects to a corner of a wire grid platform. Via Bluetooth, the motors link together and act as one, controlled by an app on your phone.
The motors can sense when the platform has more load on one side than the other and automatically self-corrects as it raises/lowers to keep the platform level.
No more getting out the ladder to the yank down holiday decorations – just pull out your phone and let them come to you!
Slat Walls and Tool Tamers
Most garages have things that don’t fit easily on shelves: brooms, rakes, yard tools, sports equipment. That’s where tool tamers and slat walls come in.
Our version of a tool tamer is simply a length of 2×4 bolted into studs that we then drill hangers and hooks into.
Many companies offer some sort of slat wall, which are pre-made lengths of plastic or metal tracks for hanging hooks/baskets/trays that can be mounted flush to your garage wall. We use a type with interlocking sections that, with some custom cutting, we can tailor to any area of wall.
Adding either or both of these in addition to custom shelving will ensure there’s nothing left laying around without a place to go.
Floor-to-Ceiling Shelving
Usually the back wall of a garage provides an opportunity to go big with shelving from floor to ceiling. For garages that aren’t very deep, we start the bottom shelf at a height that allows your vehicle’s hood to tuck underneath.
Our standard spacing is 16″ between shelves, which allows for standard plastic totes (roughly 14″x30″), our favorite sturdy box for organizing.
Using a 2’x8′ frame made from standard 2×4 lumber with plywood on top, we bolt the back of the frame into the wall studs, ensuring it’s level. Then we place legs under the front corners of each shelf to maintain level from front to back and provide bracing to the ground. When all tiers of shelving are bolted in and have legs, we finish the support by bolting on two long faceplates from the floor to the top of the uppermost shelf. Finally, we screw in the “legs” to these faceplates.
Folding Wall-Mounted Bike Racks
Like the name suggests, these are bike racks you can mount to the wall that “fold” the bikes to the side, giving you extra clearance to park your vehicles. Aside from hanging your bikes on the ceiling, which can be a real hassle to get up or down, this is the best solution we’ve found.
The bike can easily roll right into the wheel holder once you get it up on the back wheel. If you have multiple bikes, you can mount them next to each other and turn them against the wall like pages in a book.
Any one of these solutions will open up garage floor space on their own. When used together, you’ll have a garage where the only thing touching the floor are the wheels of your vehicle!
