Turn a Garage into an Efficient Place of Beauty

Even the freakiest neat freak can be stopped cold by a challenge that often seems insurmountable, even by their normally obsessive standards: the average American garage.

Whether it's a tight townhouse carport barely big enough to fit a subcompact or a sprawling, three-car stable attached to a spacious suburban home, the garage often acts as the terminal catch-all space of the American household.

Plenty of homeowners have fanciful dreams of converting their garage from a household dumping ground and occasional parking area to a tidy, bright and efficient work and storage space -- and perhaps a more frequent parking area.

Unfortunately, when faced with the daunting vision of machines, sports gear, plastic storage boxes (if they've even gotten that far), tools, garden equipment and whatever else has found its way to the cold concrete of a space ostensibly built to park automobiles, many people just shudder and put it off until another day.

The good news is that storage designers and flooring manufacturers like to think of your garage the way you might think of your kitchen - it's a space that should be functional, efficient, present a variety of storing options and wrap all that up in a beautiful package.

The key to most garage storage solutions is getting things off the floor. A number of companies have approached this task from different angles. Premier Garage (www.premiergarage.com) offers storage for garage spaces that preserves (for better or worse) the existing wall finish. Cabinets are utilitarian, but designed to bear extra weight. The company's wall-mounted grid storage system allows for quick customization using a variety of accessories such as shelves, tool hangars, baskets and hooks.

Two other companies - Designer Garage (www.designergarage.com) and GarageTek (www.garagetek.com) - offer systems that are based on a type of rigid plastic "siding" installed on garage walls. Accessories - including cabinets - are then hung in the spaces between the panels. Such systems allow for a more fluid configuration of cabinets that can be changed over time.

All the systems that involve cabinetry either suggest or make a policy of installing them at least six inches above the garage floor, making cleaning easier and discouraging household pests from taking up residency.

A prefabricated system also allows for a good bit of customization. Depending on your needs, these systems can create efficient spaces for potting plants, doing carpentry, home auto repair or any other task that might normally take up valuable floor space.

Speaking of floors, don't think designers have neglected this often cracked, oil stained element of the garage environment. There are now a number of flooring systems - either applied as a cured, single layer or in tiles - that can make a garage floor look as good as (or better than) some of the floor inside the house.

And while your mind is on the floor, don't forget to look up. Plenty of the area near a garage ceiling is potential storage space. GarageTek and a number of other manufacturers design hanging devices for large items like canoes, kayaks and truck camper shells.

The ceiling is also a great place to stash seasonal items such as coolers, lawn chairs, pool accessories and bicycles. Hanging racks can add significant storage space, and bike hoists safely get your two-wheeled transportation out of the way while freeing up space on the wall - and maybe making a bit more room for the four-wheeled transportation for which the garage was originally intended.