New Ways to Soup Up the Garage
Marty and Michele Ponton bought a new home in Anaheim Hills last year that has two garages. It was in the garages, not the spacious residence, that they held the company Christmas party.
The reason? Easy cleanup, made possible by the stylish black, gray and white granite-look floor coating they ordered for both two-car garages shortly after they moved in.
The Pontons, who lined their garage walls with heavy-duty cabinets in a tony maple finish, are part of a growing number of homeowners who see the once humble garage as something more than a place to park the family cars. That includes Marty’s prized 1970 Chevelle SS 396 convertible (once owned by actor Jason Priestley).
“I think a garage is an extension of your home,” said Michele, a fitness buff who cleans the cabinets, hoses down the floors and makes an aerobic exercise out of towel-drying them with her feet. She thinks the garages should be as neat as the inside of her house.
Indeed, today’s garage often doesn’t even look like a garage.
“It looks like a room,” said Santa Monica homeowner Mark Lindee, who added similar cabinets and floor coating to the garage of his 4-year-old custom home a few months ago.
“Except there’s three cars in it,” he added.
When they are parked, those cars are likely to be in a room with finished walls that can do double duty as a home office, a weight room or a children’s playroom, storage experts say.
For Candace and Gene Tjoa of Orange, revamping their garage expanded their children’s play area. One of the tall cabinets is devoted to toys.
“These new houses have such small backyards,” Candace said. “My kids are in the garage at least six days a week.”
Builders, including Los Angeles-based KB Home, now routinely offer garage floor coatings, also called sealants, as well as cabinets, workbenches, garage organizers and extra lighting as options, just as they offer upgraded carpet.
Advantage: The floor coating, which can take up to five days to apply, can be done before you move in.
Bonus: You can roll the cost of the improvements into your mortgage payment.
Garage storage products, once sold exclusively at hardware stores, are popping up everywhere from discounters such as Target to specialty shops such as the Container Store.
Homeowners can also turn to the Internet, which is loaded with Web sites for garage floor coating companies and garage storage businesses, including Hyloft Garage Storage in Las Vegas (https://www.hyloftusa.com). Hyloft has been selling its product--an open steel storage system that hangs from studs in the garage ceiling--at a brisk pace in California for more than a year.
At Prism Designs in Anaheim Hills (https://www.aplusgarages.com) the cabinet and garage floor coating business has been up about 60% each year for the last several years, said company president Sadegh Ghashghaie.
A Clean Storage Area for Today’s Paraphernalia
“The garage is part of your house. In fact, it’s the place you enter. You want a clean look,” Ghashghaie said.
The garage is almost your front door, says Sharon Tindell, vice president, merchandising, for the Dallas-based Container Store chain. Organization, she said, can bring piece of mind.
“Our society puts a lot more emphasis on leisure time, and all these activities have paraphernalia that people haven’t found a place for,” she said.
“There’s kids’ scooters, skateboards, snowboards, ski equipment, golfing, camping and fishing gear. There’s a proliferation of garden tools. There’s warehouse club stuff that ends up in the garage. We all have big SUVs that compete for garage space, and some even come with extra seats that have to be stored somewhere.”
When the storage and organization store opened in 1978, it offered a few hooks specifically for garage storage, she said. Now, after tracking the growing trend in garage products, the chain’s new garage brochure boasts more than two dozen items, including adjustable epoxy-bonded steel shelving with brackets for water skis and surfboards, recycling bins and containers for bulk items such as birdseed and charcoal.
“I think it’s everyone’s dream to have a garage that’s organized enough to get the cars in,” she said.
How to get started? Tindell recommends taking an inventory and trying to get rid of things you haven’t used in a year. Categorize items and organize according to frequency of use. If you just can’t part with your old camping lantern, keep it, but not in an easily accessible place, she said.
Measure your garage and look for storage areas such as under a workbench or behind the door.
Through its Web site, https://www.containerstore.com, and at its stores, the company offers free customized storage planning. Customers must supply garage measurements and inventories.
For Tindell, the key is creating a flexible system in which items are visible and accessible. Seeing your stuff reminds you of what you have and where it goes, so it’s easier to train the family to put things back, she said. But not everyone likes an open look.
“I didn’t want anything open. It just looks junky,” said Lindee, who went with white cabinets for a cleaner appearance and a gray, black and tan granite-look epoxy-polyurethane floor coating. He ordered both through J.A. Smith Co. in Agoura Hills, which serves Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Although Lindee is pleased with the wall-mounted, off-the-floor cabinets (made of industrial-strength particle board with a scuff-resistant vinyl finish) it’s the floor coating he’s really crazy about.
No more concrete dust, the gray grit that untreated floors constantly shed. No more oil stains. Everything in the garage stays cleaner, he said.
The Pontons also rave about their floor coating, applied by Prism Designs.
Epoxy-polyurethane coating once was a very expensive industrial flooring, but manufacturers have made technical improvements that mean reduced prep time and a more reasonable cost, said Ghashghaie, who uses a Sherman Williams product that comes in solid colors and several granite-look variations.
The faux granite, which uses acrylic vinyl chips between layers that are topped with a clear coat, covers imperfections in concrete.
There are many garage sealant products on the market, and buyers should make sure their garage contractor uses a product that is thermal-shock resistant and comes with warranties against what Ghashghaie calls the enemy of poly-epoxy coatings: sudden heat.
Hot Tires May Take Some Coatings Off of Floors
Some coatings fail when a car pulls in with hot tires. When it pulls out in the morning, the coating is stuck to the tires and peels up. Better products come with a five-year guarantee against this.
So what’s it all cost? It depends on exactly what you want to do, the experts say, but a typical two-car garage can easily run $3,000 for floor sealant and cabinets. Floor treatments start as low as $1.35 a square foot for solid color sealant and can run up to $4 a square foot for granite-look material.
Ghashghaie said he charges about $3.25 a square foot for most granite-look applications. Jeff Smith of J.A. Smith Co. said most of his clients go with the granite look at $3.50 to $4 a square foot, or $1,400 to $1,600 for a two-car garage; $1,900 to $2,200 for a three-car garage.
Ghashghaie put the typical cabinet cost at $1,500 to $2,000 if installed on only one side of the garage--that’s about 20 linear feet of 7-foot-tall and 4-foot-wide cabinets, plus a workbench.
The Hyloft ceiling organizer, used in place of cabinets, is sold in 4-foot by 8-foot sections that hold up to 500 pounds per section. It’s priced at $289 per section without installation.
Most two-car garages take two sections, while three-car garages require at least three, said Ernie Ruiz, part owner of Hyloft and president of Triple E Marketing in El Cajon. The kits come with written and video instructions, and installation runs about $75 a section, he said.
The Container Store’s 6-foot garage wall shelving starts at $350.
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Lynn O’Dell is an Orange County freelance writer.
