Garage panel system.

[Jonhilgen]

Ok guys, I've sold my house and we're building a much smaller one.  Not only is our home going to be smaller, but the garage as well.  It will be a two car garage, roughly 20 x 21 with 10' ceilings.  According to the Boss, there will be no woodworking to be done in it...I have shop space, but that's another story.

I have a clean slate, and I mean to keep it that way.  Slatted wall panels might be the trick, but I don't know.  My main goal is to keep all clutter out of site, except for the lawn mower and edger.  Or do I just build a ton of cabinets, on casters, wall cabinets on French cleats and be done with it?

Also, I remember a thread about floor coverings...but don't be shy about adding your experiences with these either.

Thanks for any feedback.

Jon

 

[rmwarren]

I am a HUGE advocate of having EVERYTHING on wheels. 10 years ago I scored about 40 nice Colson casters with locking brakes on ebay and since then I have never looked back.

I also standardized the height of all my base cabinets/worktables at 37" (5" for caster/32" cabinets) which maximized the yield of sheet goods and made every cabinet pull double duty as outfeed/clamping tables etc. Just wheel them to whereever I was working, lock the casters and get to work.

Sadly most everything went to new homes when we moved to the shore and my shop went from 800 SF to 120 SF. I did keep the casters though, and just re-liberated them from their latest duties on material dollies in our crawl space when we cleaned up and junked everything damaged by Sandy's water. I tossed out a mountain of damaged stuff but soaked the casters in WD-40 and packed them away for their next life.

Anyway +1 for casters.

RMW

 

[Sparktrician]

I can't disagree about the usefulness of casters.  I managed to score a bunch of them years ago from a server farm installation where, for some inexplicable reason, the customer wanted to remove all casters rather than just use the adjusting jacks to set the height and alignment.  They don't lock, but for moving heavy storage carts around, they're hard to beat. 

[smile]

 

[lawhoo]

I've done some research into slatwall panel systems and recommend that you consider Flow Wall (flowwall.com).  If you can be patient, they frequently offer their 4-foot panel packs at half price.  They're still not cheap--and the accessory hooks and cabinets (which also go on sale, but less frequently) aren't either--but if you're looking for a long-term, flexible solution, it might be worth it.  I would consider building my own cabinets.  View their videos showing how they hang their own cabinets, and I think you'll see that it's quite simple.  The only special hardware you apparently need would be a couple of U-shaped aluminum channels, maybe 1 1/4 inches wide, for each cabinet.  I'd be interested in what you (and anyone else) thinks of Flow Wall, since I'm thinking about it myself.