I spent a lot of time last month cleaning and organizing the garage for the July Household Organization Diet. This has been something that I have been wanting to do for years, but kept putting off due to pure, overwhelming, organization paralysis. I am happy to say that it is now 95% done with just a few little details to finish up! If you want to catch some sneak peaks, you can head on over to Behr’s Instagram page – I’m taking it over for the week to show off some of my garage projects!
For today, I am going to show you on of my favorite little projects that I did in the garage – our new sports equipment storage! This will mostly be used to hold all of our hockey sticks but a baseball bat and a couple of light sabers have also snuck their way in there! 🙂
This was a very simple and basically free project – you can’t get much better than that! We used an old pallet that came with a shipment of paint that we had delivered and all of the rest of the supplies we had on hand.
The pallet was in fairly rough shape so I glued down a couple of spots where the wood was splitting and clamped it together while it dried.
I then gave it a very thorough sanding using an orbital sander and a sanding block. Once it was all smooth, I stained it with a dark walnut finish.
It was looking a lot better but I wanted to add an extra little touch. Using my Silhouette, I cut out some stencils and painted the words on with some white paint. I always find that a sponge brush works best for this, applying the paint in a dabbing motion rather than actually painting it on in strokes. Once the paint had dried, I sanded it down to distress it and lightly went over it with a rag that had some left over stain on it {just to “dirty” it up a bit!}.
Load it up with all of your gear, and you are ready to go! If you have crazy kiddos like we do, you may also want to secure it to a stud using a screw. 🙂
Stay tuned for lots more garage organization ideas! I can’t wait to show you all of the befores and afters!
If you missed all of my inspiration ideas, you can find them here…
How to Organize Your Garage
tavette says
The pallet organizer – you must have had 2 pallets in order to get the back for it – right?
With the R&W wood thing to hold rakes, shovels, etc. – what keeps the tools from falling together (to the sides)?
Isn’t peg board wonderful?
Jenn Lifford says
The back of the pallet still has a top and bottom piece of wood across it so it holds everything in place and I didn’t have to add anything. 🙂
I’m not sure what the R&W wood thing is – do you mean the pallet in the Garage Organization ideas collage? I would think that they would fall somewhat to the sides.
And, yes, I love peg board!!
Cherryl dillon says
I loved you idea as soon as I saw it. I had a pallet sitting in the garage, along with some shovels and rakes piled in a corner. I immediately went out there and nailed that pallet to the wall in the corner and stuck all the tools in it. So easy and much neater. I did not paint mine, but I might in the future. It is on my blog above. Thanks for the idea!
Jenn Lifford says
Awesome! I always love hearing when people actually DO a project rather than pinning it to a Pinterest board and forgetting about it! 😉
Ana White Admin says
Great little organizer on the cheap! Love the cute customization! Featured on Ana-White.com today, thanks for sharing!
Jenn Lifford says
Thanks so much for the feature! Hope you have a great day!