Design Plans! Our Garage Workshop

My goodness, you guys! I’m so excited about this project! Shane and I have been married for 10 years this year and although we’ve always loved to make things… we’ve never had a place to really do that. When we were first married, I’d spray paint and use the borrowed tools I could get my hands on in our apartment parkade. Or in my dad’s carport. Then we bought a house (woohoo!) five years ago and we worked in our backyard, basement, or driveway and as much as that was a total improvement from where we were before… we have always dreamed of having a space that we could leave our tools set up and not away in a storage closet or shed that you have to pull out and plug in and set up every time you want to make one cut. That’s a total dream, right?!

Well… it’s happening! And I couldn’t be more excited. We have been working on this for quite a while and it’s getting so close- I have shared some sneak peeks on my Instagram Stories, but this is the first I’m sharing it on the blog. Today I’m sharing our plans for the space as well as what it looked like before! You can see all the before photos from our new home (as of this summer) RIGHT HERE.

This space is going to be one we use for a workshop. It’s not large so we won’t be parking in here as well although it was definitely meant for that when the house was built. Everything that we’ve planned has ‘workshop’ in mind because that’s what we’ll be using it for. I did also want to say that this carport has an under slab room below it. So it’s already got a foundation and roof access from the attic… it’s a part of the house. We aren’t adding on to our home. So we really just closed in the walls to make it a real garage type space. I got a lot of questions about that when I shared some of our progress on IG so there you go!

Here’s what we were working with!

You’ll see that there’s a window in the carport. We moved this when we made over Aubrey’s bedroom in the fall (you can see that update here and the reveal of that space here). We closed it all in and added a man door to the back and garage door to the front. We wired the one light into a few pot lights for great work lighting and upgraded the plugs in there to GFCI. We also drywalled it in. Now we are on to the fun stuff!

Here’s the plans:

I was totally inspired with these two photos on the bottom of the design board. And funny enough- both are from blogs I’ve followed for a long time! The one on the left is from Store Front Life who is one of the few bloggers that makes Twitter worth checking (you can check out her full garage reveal RIGHT HERE) and I love the Husky work bench in there. It’s a total dream work bench. All those little drawers hide all the tools and keep them sorted and I like the idea of having tools hanging above.

Speaking of… ORGANIZATION GOALS! Jen Woodhouse is one of the nicest people ever and an amazing builder (she also has an amazing voice but that has nothing to do with her garage…) Her collection of Ryobi Tools  that makes such good use of that vertical space is also incredible. You can see her whole post on workshop organization RIGHT HERE.

So with these two bits of inspiration in mind… we got planning! I’m really excited to be partnering with Home Depot Canada again on this space. They’re actually having a huge sale event on all the Husky workshop storage/workshop pieces right now (as part of this Store More Save More sale) so the timing is perfect! The workbench we’d priced out (not the one shown in the collage, you can see it HERE) is $100 off with the sale but almost all the pieces we got for this space have discounts.

Our plan is to have one wall of workshop pieces like this Husky one and then one wall of multipurpose storage. This will be slat wall (also TOTAL GOALS for storage!) for kids bikes and garden hoses and anything else like that. Even though our goal for this space is to use it like a workshop, we have a small yard at this house with no room for a shed so we do need to be able to store our tires in here as well so we’re using every inch of the walls and even the ceiling (or at least that’s the plan! we’ll see if our measurements were right!).

We also want it to be a space that we enjoy spending time. We added windows for natural light (and to keep the front of the house looking nice! I’m painting it out a nice bright white (Behr Swan White) and we gave the floor an epoxy treatment (this gray with blue flecks from Rustoleum).

I also want to add a couple fun DIY touches to the space- maybe a wood sign or two to give it some personality. Because that’s what every workshop needs… right?! ;)

Well friends, that’s the plans! I can’t wait to show you how it’s coming together! We will be sharing it SO SOON. Big thank you to Home Depot Canada for partnering on this one! In total transparency… we would have done this regardless and the staff at our local store that I know by name know that too… Ha! We’ve been dreaming about this space for so long.