Making Progress In The Garage | Unbloggable Spaces

One of our biggest summer projects has been (very slowly) working on fixing up our garage space. Although maybe not my first choice of where to invest our time and money, we know that putting the effort into this space now is going to be worth it when all is said and done. The garage is one of the least beautiful but most functional spaces in our home. Between using it as an extra workspace for the never ending rotation of projects on my plate and using it to store all our outdoor essentials like lawn equipment and garden tools, we use this space nearly every day. It’s a very important part of our home.

But as a function-first storage and working space, it’s understandably unsightly. It has sat neglected for most of the time we have lived in our home. The previous owners of our home never cut a door to access the attached garage directly from inside the house so we put one in as soon as we moved in, but other than that, the only other work we have put into it was last October when Curt and I devoted one of our staycation days to clean it up and organize it. As it usually goes, our one day of (attempted) organization lead to a rabbit hole of little fixes that eventually lead to a much bigger list of projects than we initially intended. I don’t have a photo of the space before we started, but we ended up removing a lot of old and unstable built-in shelving, building a new storage shelf made of 2x4’s, insulating two of the four walls that were still exposed studs, drywalling those walls, patching numerous holes, and giving the entire space a fresh coat of white paint. It has taken Curt nearly the entire Spring and Summer to get that far, but we are almost at the finish line and this space is starting to feel a little more complete.

It’s not perfect, but I decided to share more about this space here on our blog because it actually has taken a big part of our attention over the last little while. It’s still quite unsightly, but it is a part of our home. One of my goals with sharing in this digital space is that I am always authentic and real. I love showing and celebrating the beautiful parts of our home and the journey we take to get there, but I think it is just as important to show the unsightly and the works-in-progress. In fact, I decided to devote an entire series to this idea - unbloggable spaces - so that we can all remember that our homes should mostly be for living. It’s not all going to be perfect and that’s perfectly okay.

So on that note, let me fill you in. This is what our garage looked like this past Saturday morning. Because of our added renovations and fixes, the space is still largely unorganized. Most of the items are pushed to the middle of the space so we can access the walls. The walls and ceiling have all been drywalled (or patched) and freshly painted. But before we could put everything back into place, we wanted to give a special treatment to one wall with some fresh plywood.

Here’s why: Our water runs in a long pipe along the right wall of the garage. This water hookup allows us to attach a hose and bring water to the front of our property. It’s very handy and practical to have, but over the years, extra water dripping out of the hose has caused quite a bit of damage to the drywall. The pipe was held in place by a series of scrap pieces of wood that look so random and ugly. To solve these problems, we decided that it would be both practical and interesting to cover the entire bottom half of this wall in plywood and coat it all with a thick wash of varathane to protect against water damage from the hose. We think this solution will bring some visual interest to the garage and help us to protect it.

The first thing we did was carefully remove the old pieces of wood from behind the pipe. We used some twine to suspend the pipe from the ceiling after carefully removing the screws that held it in place along the wall. Next, we pried off the old pieces of wood and marked the location of each stud along the drywall. We used a couple pieces of sanded 8’ plywood and ran it flush with the bottom of the existing drywall, double checking that it ran level before attaching it to the wall. We had to make a couple of cuts in various locations - one to fit around an existing light switch and a few to fit around the bevel of the stairs - but the cuts were easy to make with a jigsaw. We really wanted it to stretch along the entire length of the wall so it looked very intentional. We made really specific measured markings to indicate where we would put each screw so it looked visually uniform across the wall.

Once we had the plywood up, we decided to add a strip of 1x2” pine as trim along the top to make it look a little more finished. It was a really inexpensive fix, but makes a world of difference in how complete the finished product looks. We simply used a little bit of wood glue and some brad nails to fasten it in and caulked along the crack where the trim met the wall to make it look more finished.

Next we just need to add some thick coats of varathane to waterproof it all, reattach the pipe, and touch up some of the paint above it, but we are already so excited for the balance of function and style that this simple plywood fix brings to our garage. We are just about at the point where we can reorganize everything and get it back into place, but we do still have a few projects we would like to tackle to finish out this space, including resurfacing the floor and building a couple of extra storage units for our winter tires and firewood. I’m sure I will share more about this project as we continue to progress.

I know this post is a little random, but I do want to make sure that I am more intentional about sharing the things we are working on around here, even when they aren’t necessarily bloggable. There is a lot of real life that happens in these walls and that’s just as important as the exciting projects. We’re excited about how far we have come in our garage and can’t wait to see it continue to develop as we are able to put more work and money into it. But for now, we’ll continue to take it one little step at a time.