Dec 23

Imagine a beautiful spring day. You want to go biking, go fishing or even enjoy a picnic with your family. When you enter your garage to gather your gear and head to having fun you have a tremendous surprise: your stuff is all over the place, on the floor, messed up in corners, misplaced in various drawers. Organizing your garage is as easy as figuring out where to start. The first thing is to purchase some cabinets, some shelves and hammer a series of nails into the walls.

The storing and sorting goes as follows. Categorize each object and place it in a place specially designed for it. For example sporting gear should be placed in a cabinet or on some shelves, tools should be placed in drawers or hung on to some peg boards. Be ruthless about throwing away and  don’t think twice before you throw away anything that you haven’t used recently or anything that’s broken. If you haven’t repaired it yet, chances are you won’t repair it. Seasonal gear should also be sorted, boots and out-of-season coats should be organized in small closets.

After you finish organizing, sorting and throwing away unwanted items you will be surprised to see your garage floor and corners again. Maybe your car will fit in the garage again.

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Dec 23

If you are considering remodeling you garage you might consider choosing a rubber flooring for your garage. This is an inexpensive option for general purpose flooring: most common uses include parking vehicles on the rubber flooring, converting the garage space into a play area or into a workout room.

Parking your car on a recycled rubber matting is the least common use for this product because of two major inconveniences: recycled rubber tire products have very little resistance to petroleum products so an oil leak could seriously damage the floor; the melting point of this type of flooring is relatively low, in extreme circumstances the heat from the tires can be sufficient to melt the tires into the mat.

If planning to remodel for your garage and you also have changing the flooring in mind, it is important to know the primary function that you need your floor to fulfill. If you are going to convert your garage into a dog-house, the rubber flooring would provide insulation against extreme temperatures of the cement as well as an extra cushioning. Also you must consider the ease of maintenance for this type of flooring.  For a home theater, a rubber flooring is desired to reduce the noise transmission.

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Dec 23

Ever since the first suburbs were built, the garage became a measure of the financial prosperity of a family. At first there was one, then two, but now four garages are becoming the newest form of decadence in home building. A real estate agent would say that people have a log of gear and items these days so there is a huge demand for a place to store them. These garages, in some instances, may be larger than many apartments, housing more cars than ever. The third and maybe fourth family car is a necessity for families where kids stay home longer and the restrictions on street parking are one of the factors that point towards building larger garages.

Moreover, every man has his love for the “toys”  such as boats, jet skis, motorcycles, bikes, power tools and workbenches and these “toys” need storage. A look into a three or four car garage may reveal tools, bikes, sporting gear, a workshop and a 25-foot boat.  This visual degradation of the suburban landscape is an aspect of materialism that won’t stop turning any time soon.

Not everybody likes this trend. Some home builders spend the extra time and money on architectural plans that can split these huge expanses of square footage into opposite sides of the house. A problem that appears here is the problem of the house’s design after this transformation. The most aesthetical are the back-loading garages but they require the use of the backyard space for turning radiuses. Side-loading garages need wider home sites but can make the front of the house look enormous. With the current rising costs for land, in many areas this is not feasible in the long run. This is a sign of a mega-materialism, that is: if one is good five is better so more and more people understand only one thing: that a garage is not good unless it is as big as a basketball court.

When will it stop?
Are we going to have the house attached to a garage ten times bigger than the house? Maybe it would be better for everyone to think twice before making such a commitmentwhen buying a house attached to the garage. Maybe it would be better if people would care about the simpler and more basic things in life than owning a four car garage.

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