Is Your Garage Peek-Worthy?
Is Your Garage Peek-Worthy?
Summer’s here, and in suburbia, that means everyone is out on the streets. Walking strollers and dogs. Going for a run. Shooting baskets in the driveway. Hanging out in folding chairs enjoying a sunset with a cold beverage or two. While all this activity is happening, do you leave your garage door up or down?
Put another way, the real question is, “Is your garage peek-worthy?”
For much of the country, sadly, the answer is no. That’s because the garage has essentially become America’s junk drawer. “Just put it in the garage!” Sound familiar? Everybody does it. But over time, that pile of camping gear and sports equipment that started in the corner of your garage grows and grows, shrinking your space to a barely usable minimum — and making your garage look like a cluttered nightmare to anyone passing by.
Beyond the disorganization, there’s the floor itself. What started out as unblemished bare concrete is now a cracked, spalled, stained eyesore. It’s no wonder you wouldn’t want your garage door up when your neighbor jogs by with her golden doodles!
Luckily, there is a solution. In fact, it’s the entire reason we at Hello Garage of Seattle exist. Because our mission is to turn “America’s junk drawer” into its new front door. (Think about it: how often do you enter your home through your front door anyway? If you’re like most people, you enter through your garage, right?)
Start With the Floor
The easiest way to transform your cluttered, dingy garage into a peek-worthy showroom is to redo your garage floor. Available options range from DIY products like paints and tiles to serious professional solutions like polymer floor coatings. For this article, we’ll take a look at the pro-options since the DIY ones tend to fail pretty miserably.
So, that leaves you with polymer coatings, typically epoxies or polyureas. While both produce a clean, hard surface, both are susceptible to peeling, flaking and yellowing over time. There is, however, a type of polyurea that has been formulated to avoid these problems. It’s called polyaspartic floor coating technology, and it’s what we use at Hello Garage of Seattle.
The only catch with polyaspartic garage floor coatings is that they must be installed by professionals with the experience and equipment to do the job right. That’s because polyaspartics can be quite tricky to install otherwise. The Hello Garage of Seattle's Dream Team (our mighty installation crew) has only ever installed polyaspartics. It really is our bread and butter. So, we know exactly how to prep the surface and install the product, so it bonds with the concrete beneath and looks fantastic for decades to come.
In fact, when you compare the cost of a Hello Garage of Seattle's polyaspartic floor to that of an epoxy or non-polyaspartic polyurea floor over its lifetime, the polyaspartic floor is typically much less expensive. Plus, you don’t have to go through the hassle of emptying your garage to redo its floor every few years!
Get Organized!
Once the floor is done, it’s on to busting the clutter. And that takes some innovative organizational tools. As you’ve probably guessed, this is our other passion. You see, we spent months and months researching and developing storage solutions that are specifically designed to make your life easier. Hello Garage engineers studied different kinds of steel, hinges, closures, shelves, brackets… you name it, they ate, drank and slept it.
But all that hard work paid off in spades, as we ended up developing welded steel cabinets and shelves that are incredibly strong and tough, yet they look great and will continue to do so for years to come. We also created a slatwall system that allows you to hang oddly shaped or long items easily on any garage wall.
Flooring and storage are taken care of, so what’s next? Well, you want to make your newly transformed garage a welcoming space for whatever you’ll use it for. That means adding things like LED lighting and a built-in garage vacuum system. And to let in air and light while keeping out bugs and litter, you can finish off your dream garage with a retractable garage door screen.
Now, this all sounds like a lot to take in, and it is. But it’s important to remember that you can do these things over time. Start with the floor. Then figure out your storage needs. Or maybe, if your existing floor isn’t too bad, reverse those options. Then add finishing touches like the screen and vacuum.
The point is, there are a ton of ways you can transform your dark and dreary garage into something you’ll want to show off to the whole neighborhood. The key is to start imagining and thinking outside the box. And the best way to do that is to talk to a Hello Garage of Seattle Garage Guru. They’ll take the time to customize a roadmap to get you to an ultra-peak-worthy dream garage!
In the meantime, you can visit HelloGarageofSeattle.com to learn more and book a free consultation.