Are You Wasting Space In Your Garage?

BJLower

For some strange reason they are building 2 story houses where the roof of the garage is just a bunch of open space.


If you want more storage space than you can probably use build wood shelves that hang down from the ceiling. We've done a couple of them and you can't imagine the amount of storage you can make out of all that wasted space? We have even built ladders on the sides of them so that you can get to the shelves you want just using a safety ladder.


Getting up to that high ceiling can be a bit rough. I have a 14 foot safety ladder that I can borrow.


We build the base out of the shelves out of 2x4's with one center cross support. We make the base an even 4' by 8' so you can just lay your plywood in and tack it with a few screws.


Scuba tanks are one thing are hard to find a place to store. On the bottom of the bottom shelves I took some nylon strapping and just put four on either side of the center support. My tanks just slide into the loops and hang from the ceiling. For some strange reason everyone refers to them as my “Bomb Racks.”


I thought of it when I had a one story garage that just had a main center beam. I put 4 off of the center beam and 2 over the garage door. Just six 4' by 8' shelves made for a lot of storage.


If if you have joist of even a drywalled garage ceiling you can make a lot of extra storage.


You'll never have to crawl into you attic again.


One little trick that my dad thought of. Do you always tend to pull your cars too far into the garage?
Mark the right spot you want to stop and hang a tennis ball from the ceiling by a string. Stop your car when the tennis ball touches the windshield and you always have the most room open in the area in front of the cars where every thing in most garages is.


BJ

skipjack

My last house had a really high roof with a "storage truss" system in the garage. There was tons of room up there. However, getting stuff up there was the hard part. It had to be 10' off the floor plus the space between the joists really limited the size of things you could store up there.

So, it pretty much was just a place to store a few holiday decorations and some scrap wood. Kind of a waste, really.

I had considered building some sort of block and tackle lift and framing a larger opening so I could store my snow thrower and/or lawn mower in the off season.. or my patio furniture in the winter. Those were the things that really took up space in my garage.

I never got around to building it, though... I got divorced instead.

BJLower

A friend has a house on the Crystal River in Florida so it's naturally built up pretty high on stilts.


Hauling groceries up the stairs and beer and munchies down to the ground got to be a real pain. He didn't think I could do it, but it ended up being a pretty easy job.


I built a dumbwaiter that was powered by a garage door opener. If actually came up inside of one of the bottom kitchen cabinets.


The 1 hp garage door open he bought ended up having a lot more power than we actually needed. So it has enough power for the little ones to have fun riding up and down in it. If it didn't have the springs you couldn't lift a good size wood garage door with hurting your self.


The great thing is that a garage door opener already has the switches to stop the garage door, or in this case dumbwaiter in exactly the spot you want it too. For an attic you would just leave in up when not in use.


You want to use a chain drive and not a screw drive for pretty obvious reasons.


The smaller that you would probably like to have dumbwaiter was pretty simple to build. We used 4 pieces of galvanized pipe for the corners. We did that so he could just unscrew the pipes if the happened to get in the way of anything. We put rollers at the top and bottom of the dumbwaiter so that it would roll up and down nice and even.


We put the top “stop switch” way up in the top of the cabinet in the kitchen. It only took a couple of adjustment to get it to stop so that the bottom of the dumbwaiter was nice and even with the bottom of the cabinet.


We just used a hose clamp for the “stop Switch” at the bottom at a good height for loading the groceries in. We forgot and had to and in a quick disconnect for the wire so he could just unplug it if he had to move the pipes for the dumbwaiter.


If that's the biggest problem you run into on a DYI project it kind of scares you.


The chain was hooked to the top of the dumbwaiter.


You would probably want to use something like a 4x4 piece of plywood. Pretty much the same thing. Yo will have to run extensions up at the corers so that it pulls evenly.


BJ