Garage shelves can go a long way to tackling the organization of this room. The garage can end up being a home for kinds of different things. Sporting equipment, tools and power yard equipment may have all found their way to this area. If your garage is presently only being used as a storage facility, you could probably use the help of some garage shelves.
Garage storage shelves come in two types. The fist type are the site built ones. These will generally be less money than premade ones. By building garage shelves on site you get the advantage of making them a custom size. This allows you to make each one the right size to store what you have picked out to store on it. You can get everything you need for this at your local home supply store.
A basic garage shelf would be made of plywood that is at least half an inch thick. The lenght and width of the garage shelf is left up to you depending on what is to be stored on it. These garage storage shelves are held up by some heavy duty shelf brackets. YOu don’t want the thing to fall down after putting stuff on them. You should make sure that when mounting these brackets to use heavy duty screws. You should also make sure these heavy duty screws are screwed into a stud for strength.
Another type of site built garage shelf would be where the garage floor supports them. You can use 2 x 4’s. A good spacing is to use 50 inches apart vertically. You can then attach them to the rafters of your ceiling, if exposed, or ceiling joists. The next step would be to make a frame for a piece of plywood to sit on creating the shelf. Again using 2 x 4’s for structure and strength. Since you are building this on site, the option to make the garage shelves any size you want is there.
For storing relatively small items you could do the following. Use 1 x 2 strips. secure these strips horizontally to the inside edges of two of the 2 x 4’s. The spacing is up to you so they can be made to accomodate the size of the small items. Now you can either cut and place the appropriate size plywood or other pieces of wood to lay on top. You now have a garage shelf for storing small things like cans and bottles. Cans and bottles are excellent storage vehicles for screws and bolts.
Now lets talk about prefabricated shelving. For heavy items, steel shelving is the way to go. For lighter items, plastic shelving will be adequate. The only problem with steel garage shelving is that you can not cut it to the size you want. Steel shelving comes in standard sizes. Make sure you have the room to fit a prefab unit of this type.
Also when going the route of prefabricated shelving, you will want to look to see if they are adjustable or not. By being adjustable a lot more stuff could possibly be stored on them. Make sure the mechanism used to adjust them is strong enough to hold the weight of whatever you are going to put on them.
There is one thing that you should and will always want to do for safety. Always secure your garage shelve to the wall so it does not tip over.