HOME TOUR // THE GARAGE

*FTC disclosure: I was provided one free storage item from Monkey Bar Garage Storage Systems from their local dealer, Garage Solutions Minneapolis in connection with this review. All opinions are my own. 

M and I live in a little one and a half story home in a suburb of Minneapolis. 

This means we have a proportionally little garage to complement our little house. 

SO, the garage had never been a huge priority of ours in terms of beautifying and organizing, until recently when it reached max-nasty and upon pulling the car in one night, M said to me, "ACK, I need to organize the garage. This is a mess."  

Picture the perfect timing then when I was contacted by Monkey Bars Garage Storage Systems about a product review for a storage solution for our garage. Yayyy! Above you can see our previous "storage solution" (a term I use loosely), which was haphazard nails rammed into a 2 x 4 leftover from the previous owners. 

{the other side of our garage, equally a disaster}

The other side at least had some shelving, but that was organized quite haphazardly as well.

I selected the large tool yard rack, and it arrived less than a week later. So on Monday of this past 3 day weekend I approached M about hanging it. We'd been pretty busy doing house stuff all weekend- organizing closets, tossing clothes, painting the kitchen and hanging shelves (stay tuned on this one!), and cleaning, so his initial response was something more than a groan and just shy of a full fledged grunt. I told him it'd be easy and we trudged out to the garage.

Upon opening the package I found the bar (le duh), some hanging accessories and 2 brackets. Instead of mounting it to the old 2 x 4, we pulled down the old board to keep a lower profile and so tools wouldn't bump the car as we drove in.

I skimmed over the instructions and relayed the info to M who replied, "wait, that's it? Ok..." (the lack of readily apparent difficulty was met with heavy skepticism by M, who by now knows with house projects, nothing is as easy as it looks).

But nope, it seriously was that easy. Each bracket got 2 screws with washer heads, and the bar itself slid through one hole and into the other and was secured by those little push-button locking devices.

It seriously took 10 minutes. We spent more time tinkering around with the multiple styles of hanging accessories to determine how best to hang all our tools, and we didn't even use every hanging bar. The accessory pieces just kind of "clip" on the bar and are held by a tiny lip that catches on the bottom or back end.

If anything, this bar is too nice for our garage. I told M we need to keep a running list of "fixtures and appurtenances" to take down or make sure to keep out of any future purchase agreement because they're coming with us.

Now all our tools have a nice little home.

This of course spurred M to say, "aw screw it, let's just clean up the rest of the garage right now."
So we grouped fishing, outdoorsy stuff, and yard stuff together and tossed a bunch of scrap wood.

We still need to borrow the neighbor's push broom to sweep it out, but now it's actually become a place I feel comfortable storing some "nice" "outdoorsy" things vs. a place where things that we don't care if they get filthy land. 

So THANK YOU Monkey Bars Storage Systems and Garage Solutions Minneapolis (LOCAL company, FTW!), for helping us organize and clean up our garage!

I'll definitely be keeping them in mind for when we have a bigger garage someday that I can fill with useful (and PRETTY) storage items (like these beautiful garage cabinets/work space area. Swoon.) Getting excited over garage organization.. does this mean I'm officially old?

M and I hung some pretty sweet shelves in our kitchen this weekend too, which has me itching to properly photograph and update the kitchen home tour post, so stay tuned for that!