Is There a Car in Your Garage? Garage Storage Ideas

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We love our vehicles.

It is not terribly uncommon to have more than two cars per household here in the USA.*

Are yours parked in your garage?

Or is the real question why we have so much stuff?

Sometimes there is one more vehicle (or multiple vehicles) than parking spaces in the garage. Other times there’s too much stuff in the garage to even park one car.

Why do we have one (or TWO!) $10K, $20K or $60k vehicle(s) parked outside our driveways while $2K worth of junk occupies the shaded, semi-air conditioned space inside our garages? I know I have a few nice tools, but they don’t total up more than one of the cars in the garage. In addition, the tools certainly don’t get me from point A to point B in style. This is always my reasoning for getting my car back in the garage as fast as possible.

There are at least three self storage businesses within a 2-mile radius of my house. There are two others under construction within a 1-mile radius of my house. One of the two is right across the street from the pictured neighborhood in the last post. So perhaps the parking problem will go away once the new storage place is open for business. I have my doubts, but maybe.

Propagating this storage problem

Using the garage as a storage facility is a slippery slope easily traversed. First, you back out the car just a couple days while you move stuff around. Then it is another project that takes a couple months. Soon there is no going back and the stuff has taken over!

I had to laugh a long time ago when my neighbor’s four year old son came rolling up on his bike. It was one of those periods when I was spending way too much time with my wet tile saw set up in the garage and my car was parked outside. He stopped, put his elbows on the handlebars, cupped his hands around his sweet face and innocently asked, “Why do you park your car in the garage?

In the moment, I quickly realized he asked this question because his family’s cars are permanently outside. Despite the fact most of our neighbors store at least one car in their garage, his family’s habit is his normal view of the world. All I could say in the nicest way possible was something along the lines of, “A garage is for cars. It is not just coincidence we have big garage doors and enough space to park two cars.” He thought about it silently a moment and nodded, the logic making sense. Then smiled his sweet four year old smile and raced away on his garage kept bike.**

Obviously, the neighbor boy learned the garage is not for cars. We all have deeply ingrained impressions on how the world works. So some of the problem is a result of upbringing too.

How to change the garage storage problem

Parking cars outside is not the solution. Neither is getting a space at the self storage. All those solutions mean we have too much stuff or a lack of storage in our homes.

Getting rid of our unused items is the hardest, but correct solution. I challenged myself to remove one thing a day from the house last year. Even if it was only a little piece of paper, at least it was one more thing gone. I need to start this again…

One of the things I discovered is I really dislike that I have so many things that I feel guilty about getting rid of. I don’t enjoy them. They sit tucked away in a box and never see the light of day. Still I keep them stashed away in the closet. Why am I keeping them? So many are based on, “What if the person who gave it to me knew I got rid of it?”

That sounds terrible when I say it out loud and even worse in this article. But really, it is a crummy way of deciding to keep an object. You should be surrounded by items you love, enjoy, AND USE–not guiltily stash away.

Garage storage ideas

Once you have trimmed down your belongings to the essentials and beloved items, getting a storage system in place may be the next answer.

Sometimes it is a matter of not having good use of vertical space. Shelving or cabinets are one answer. There are also specialized hook and pressure fitting type organizers designed for hanging gardening and other tools with longer handles and poles like this one.

This is the one in our garage.

The one problem with the organizer is it is plastic. Some of the slots have broken off with the garage climate here in Arizona: hot and dry. YMMV with this decently cheap solution. When more hooks break I’ll spring for a metal one like this one or this one.

Overhead space is a great way to park a car and use the space above it. My husband’s former roommate had one of these overhead garage storage systems in his garage and it was solid! Bonus: it doubles as a pull up bar.

Upon further research, an overhead storage with a cable system would be easier to put gear up above without relying on a ladder. More stability and easy loading is a good thing especially if you are looking for storage for items like bulky Christmas trees, camping gear, etc.

For those of you who have bicycles, there are several house/garage storage ideas. More on these in the next post…

Consider unused spaces throughout your home.

Another potential storage location is your attic. If you can use the attic, great, but oftentimes you don’t want your stuff to freeze in the winter or bake in the summer.

We built a small platform in the attic of my house to hold spare tile and baseboard.

Do you have a stairway in your house? There may be room for a closet under the stairway!

In all honesty, I still struggle with the problem of having too much stuff myself. Adding a couple kids only adds to the madness.

Despite the struggles listed above, the goal of this post isn’t guilt. It is to help you think about your living situation, discover some garage storage ideas, and revisit if it is worth parking your car(s) in the garage.

Also, make sure you look at the neighborhood parking situation as part of the equation when are you are looking for a new place to call home.

*My family certainly has this problem although a couple may be worth less than the contents of the garage. In our defense, there are still two cars in the garage and the ones that are outside are legally parked in my very own driveway. We are actively working on thinning the herd…

**I’ll at least concede on storing bikes in a garage versus outside or in a shed. In the AZ sun, tires cook in a summer.