Nathan's Birthday Surprise

I had a big surprise planned for Nathan's birthday--shelves for the garage! When I told my mom, she was like, "Really?" I guess it kind of sounds like buying your wife a vacuum cleaner for your anniversary. But I KNEW he would love it. No matter how many times we straighten up the garage, it dissolves back into chaos within days. The problem is, even though we have a 3-car garage we don't have enough space for all our stuff if we want to park both cars in there. Mostly because we don't have a basement or any good storage in the house.  There are some amazing built-in shelves on the right side of the garage--I guess you could call it "my" side because that's where all the children's clothes are in totes (newborn to size 14) and also Christmas decorations, Halloween costumes, etc. But on Nathan's side, his tools get buried in bikes and extra toilet paper and boxes of miscellaneous stuff that we don't know what to do with.

So I made a great plan to build the shelves. I watched tons of Youtube videos. My parents and Aunt Jessie and Uncle Will sent money to me for Nathan's gift and I was able to make it even cooler.

This is a "before" picture, except that I forgot to take it until I'd already started cleaning things out. Usually there is no space to walk around. See that table on the right, buried in crap? That's Nathan's work bench, which he couldn't use.

The book shelf was just hanging out, waiting for us to move the kids' rooms around so we could put it in Vander's room.

And here's the after! Voila! It was much easier to put up those shelves than I thought it would be. The studs were marked on the walls already and I bought some super-awesome screws that didn't need to be predrilled. I was able to get everything up during Bellana's nap. It took 17 brackets @ $2 each and one 4x8 foot sheet ($8) of sheathing which was cut in thirds to make 16" deep shelves which can hold totes. I installed them 18 inches from the ceiling.

His work bench is clear!

Here's another angle. The space you see is usually filled with all the totes and chests in the foreground, and the space where THEY are was filled with bikes.

My favorite part is the Kobalt bar on the left. It was $10 and the bike hooks were $5 each. Once bike season is over, I'm putting them all up there! (Our ceiling is too low to hang bikes from the ceiling.) The bookcase will be going in a bedroom soon and the rest of the stuff will be organized when we have a free weekend. I only had a few hours to do things, so I had to finally start throwing things back in without organizing.

Thanks to the extra money from family I was able to get the black shelf in the back corner too. It has most of his power tools and "toys" on it. I was going to get a few more of those shelves but then our dishwasher died and I thought I should save some money. (But that's another post.)

When he came home, he stood and stared at it for 5 minutes, muttering, "Sandi did this? She did this. Maybe she got help? No, she did it herself. HOW did she do it with all the kids home?" Then he came in the house and found me and said, "Are you in Super Nesting Mode, or what?!" He was very happy and started dreaming of how to do even more.  He has spent a lot of time in the garage since then, tinkering at his bench and organizing things the way he wants.

And now I am on fire to build some shelves for MYSELF to put over the deep freeze and to help organize the kids' clothing totes a little better. Now that I'm in the third trimester of pregnancy, though, it's hard to find the energy for these big projects!