Garage Overhaul (non-crafty)

The past month has been very busy for my DH and I.  We made our springtime journey to Disney World to celebrate Cinco De Mayo.  Ole!  We had a blast.  The weather was HOT, just the way we love it.  Our travel buddies decided to meet us there at the last minute, so that made this trip extra nice.

When we came home we decided to do a little DIY project on our garage.  I don't think we expected this project to be as big as it turned out (or for my muscles to hurt days after as they did), but I think our end result is pretty spectacular, if I do say so myself.

Our garage is a standard two car garage with a small storage area off to the side.  It's about 495 square feet total.  I know the square footage because I've measured, remeasured and checked it again when we ordered the tiles for the floor.  I didn't want to come up short and didn't want to waste money ordering way too much.  We placed the order for the interlocking PVC tile back in March when the company was offering free shipping.  The two little words I just love to hear is "free shipping", especially when it comes to ordering 30+ boxes of tile.  Little did we realize until the freight company called to set up the delivery time that we would be responsible for unloading the 915 pound shipment from the truck!!  After going back and forth with the delivery company to set up a date when my DH would actually be in town and I could take off from work to do said unloading, our tile arrived.  It actually arrived the same day our painters came out to paint the garage.  If there is one thing we have learned in the past is that we dislike painting very much.  It doesn't matter the room size or if the room is completely empty we just don't like it!  Hence, we are not very good at it.  We've been very lucky to find a painting team who are great at what they do, nice to deal with, clean, and pretty reasonably priced.  Sold!  We (they) painted the walls with Benjamin Moore Silver Dollar.  They were done in no time! 

The following week we were off to Disney World....so our new tiles sat.  After we returned, we got right to it.  First we emptied and vacuumed the garage.  Next we found the garage center by measuring and snapping a chalk line.  We started the tile in the center of the garage.  (Prior to ordering, I did a drawing on Visio to plan out our design.  This also helped with ordering the correct amount of tile)  We used a rubber mallet to tap the tiles into place.  The 'field' section went pretty fast.  Our design is a checkerboard pattern with a border of black tile all around the room, and the border area took much more time.  Each tile needed to be measured and cut so all areas would be equal.  We didn't want to have a full tile on one side and half a tile on the other.  If the design was just all one color, the project would have gone a lot faster, but I am very happy with what we decided on.

For a storage system, we decided to go with  Gladiator Garage Works.  This will be a work in progress for a few months.  We decided that we need to live with it for a little bit before going out and purchasing everything at once.  This system is good for growing in stages because once you hang the tracks, you can easily move and add things as you need to.  When we purchased the first set of cabinets, Lowes was having a sale - buy a tall Gearbox get a wall cabinet for free!  We may wait to see if that sale comes back around!

The windows are also a work in progress; I'm not sure what to do with the treatments.  Prior to the make over, I had black window panels hanging.  My DH didn't like them because they blew around whenever the doors were open.  I'd still like to stick with black for the color.  Currently we have those black Redi Shade paper shades for privacy.