I'm mortified to show you the "before" of our garage....

....but I'm quite proud of the "after" so I'll go ahead and suck up my embarrassment. 

The history of our garage: we have a 2 car garage, which might have been minimally organized at one point in time, shortly after we moved in.  And I say minimally, because it was more just that everything at least had a home that wasn't on the floor; but it still needed a LOT of work.  There was a lot of stuff that needed to be purged.  We weren't using the storage that was available to its fullest potential. 

Then, this spring rolled around and things went from bad to worse.  We were in a frenzied rush to get a bunch of stuff done before Liam's birthday party, and the result was that all of the supplies from those projects got tossed into one side of the garage.  On the floor.  Brian's car was displaced and forced out into the driveway.  Enough was enough! 

I also wanted to use this time to attempt to create a "mini mudroom" area.  We always enter the house through the garage, which goes into our gameroom.  There is no closet space in the gameroom, so essentially what happens every day is this: I get the kids out of the car from daycare, Jake leaves his shoes right in front of the door (because there was no room for him on the shoe rack, thanks to me and Brian having completely taken over that space), then all of the stuff from daycare (coats, backpacks, gloves, hats, etc...) gets tossed onto the floor in the gameroom, OR some of it gets brought upstairs and ends up in various spots all over the house.  This was not working for two reasons: 1) because my OCD ways caused me to twitch whenever I'd see that pile of things on the floor, and 2) because things easily get misplaced this way.  Who wants to spend 5 minutes every morning going, "Jake!  Where are your shoes?  Have you seen your gloves?" 

All of that being said, here are the before pictures....try to not judge me too much.

And after:

Hey look, our garage has a floor!

the shelves actually make sense now, organized by what is on them...what a novel concept.

And the part I was most excited about, the mini-mudroom area!

Yeah, I know it's not much (and certainly not as dazzling as all of the mudroom pictures I see online and drool over), but it's a vast improvement over what we had before.  This spot is right by the door, which is where the freezer lived previously, so we just had to relocate the freezer to another wall.  The "bench" is actually a book shelf that Brian had from his childhood (we used it in our old house in the playroom) that was living in our attic.  When flipped over on its side, it becomes the perfect height for Jake to sit on while taking his shoes on and off, and the shelves become the perfect cubbies for their stuff.  The green buckets inside the cubbies are from the dollar bins at Target (of course!) and will hold winter accessories once that time rolls around.  The hooks hanging on the wall were already there when we moved in, and the picture that's on the wall was previously in our guest room but not being used there anymore. 

Grand total cost for his project: $3 for the bins.  Can't beat that!!