Garage Worktops & Storage

We’re moving to a new house and I’m looking at options for garage storage and workspace. I’d like a workbench and tool storage plus some racking for ‘stuff’.

I love the look of this kind of thing: https://www.sgs-engineering.com/stc7200b-stainless-steel-work-bench

For shelving there seems to be a million different online sellers of racking.

Can you inspire me with your solutions and make recommendations that are readily available (rather than handcrafted wonders or reused old kitchen worktop etc.)?

The BigDug racking & workbenches are perfectly serviceable.

I have all my tools in a stack of machine mart tool trolleys.

I got a few of these shelving units for my garage.
For the price, they are great. The actual MDF shelves seem quite thin, but when fully built up, they are nice & solid.
Ideally, I would have varnished the shelves to give them some protection from damp/water but couldn’t be bothered in the end.

GARAGE SHELVING

Also got one of these workbenches, which is basic but does the job.

1x CRW Workbench – Lower Half Shelf – 915mm High – 400kg – Chipboard – Grey

If I was doing some woodworking or other heavier duty tasks I’d get something a bit more robust but just for a general workbench this is OK.

Based on the cabinet you posted in your OP, your budget for this kind of thing is probably a bit higher than mine!

Once we get our extension sorted which will involve clearing the whole garage out so the walls can be increased in height & a new roof put on, I will probably take the opportunity while it’s empty to install vinyl tiles over the whole floorspace, which will be great.
Will also make sure the walls are completely painted. At the moment, I’ve done patches over the years as I’ve got access to them, but it’s a right mess.

Storalex shelving and workbench from https://www.tufferman.co.uk/ are doing me well. Shelves are only MDF but have held up well for 5+ years in a single-brick walled damp(ish) garage. I’ll replace with some thing like marine ply sometime.. Very robust framework.

I improved the workbench top by initially using the cheapest offcut of kitchen worktop I could find in B&Q (as in photo below) but now reusing an old Ikea desk top with a layer of 5mm rubber glued to it. Perfect now.

I went for bigdug shelves and workbench. Go for the deeper section heavier duty shelves so they don’t sag. They’ve been up for about 6 years and no problems so far. The ‘really useful’ boxes are excellent for efficient storage as they don’t taper upwards.

Thanks, all. Some great suggestion for my research!

For racking I’d checkout Facebook ( I have big dug and it’s great but it’s greater if you can get it second hand and there are quite a few people who appear to be selling good racking) and also on fb are lots of people selling storage crates.

Think about depth, (in my VERY limited knowledge), racks come in 450, 600, 900 and 1200 wide (and probably others as well ) , the width lets you store stuff in different ways (eg i can get 3 bikes under the 1200 wide one which is why I bought it and the 600 ones let you store stuff end on when the 450 ones are too short etc but the 450s are great around the next to the boiler which needs service access.

Adjustment – my racks only allow the height to be changed (with an angle grinder), due to the way they hammer together I can’t adjust length or width so bear that in mind when choosing sizes to fit your space.

Got about 5 of the steel/mdf shelves linked above. Not showing you my garage as there is a huge pile of camping gear waiting to be used in a week or so taking up all the space.

I fixed a load of 2 slot to the wall and cut 18mm ply for the shelves.

Super heavy stuff sits on the floor but the shelves take a good bit of weight as well.

It’s meant I can be flexible with the number & spacing of the shelves, and can change that fairly easily as needed.

Check Homebase as well, that SGS tool unit is identical to one we got from Homebase at half the price!

I know you said no handcrafted wonders but… I’ve used a couple of shop bought options, the steel-and-mdf is good as long as you don’t get the cheapest, but this time round I went quick-and-cheap diy and it is so good, as well as free. Made all my shelves out of old wardrobe doors and sides and such, made chunky frame out of a wooden bunk bed I picked up, rigged the crossbar shelf supports to be movable for the future. Takes a little longer but you can tailor it to your exact needs and costs nowt. I tailored it for the big really useful boxes I like to fit perfectly, and with a bottom level space built to exactly fit my spare bike and car wheels and filled that out with some boxes on wheels I made to fit, and because I hate stuff falling between and behind shelves I put a little more work into making each “layer” complete without gaps, lovely. All very fast and dirty really, sharpie-accuracy and tracksaw speed but totally worth it.

Worktops, I had a steel one, hated it. So much noise. Slab of MDF or chipboard and just make sure you can replace it later if you want, don’t build on top of it or tie it in too much.

Though I will say, for light duty these are surprisingly good, I didn’t have the space this time round but in the last garage setup I had, I got one of these and kept it just for electrical and light work and it was great. Tons of space under, the massive drawer was great, I put some lights on it. I miss having that, the best workbench is more workbench.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/176248679087?itmmeta=01HTZV32J9R6AFQTDHYCQAR2AK&hash=item29093d6aaf:g:jU4AAOSwGiRl8aNJ&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA8EWdjZEWWoDQnmRIozQLuvufJd%2BmhXkaBC7Xdz7JuJfPn%2FnNUk76SnFnrgQbS07Qv13f9CJTPyyRn%2F0Ie4QNM5coIeWJWor8ZOKEqqS5ZLGOlwn%2BgkOwE7GOVLc6s5pSsUCA8BMdllhlt7qKW7LQCWkwl3tzzBuCJsAMhc6XsaHd7NU9NiDYKxuxC0olEVuT3B0QLBUbhBgWZxdTGdYGj72Hj%2FZH%2BDcyHjprNYbS29cwZpsu5ksyN76r8XGRPSTtDf%2BlyfLH1rP8zf%2F4K57Cbi3qPOyp1WKFGDvXzKDa0KMrr%2BGI2It6fdsL%2Fs9kqYx%2FEg%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR5ipjPvXYw

Oh yeah, make an outside workspace if you can. Seriously, I have no idea how this took so long to occur to me but I aquired a cheap standalone bench and chucked it in the garden, stuck a cheap vice on it. Amazing for dirty work, on account of being outside- it’s covered in spills, paint, and right now about a ton of rust flakes and dust, the work surface is covered in scars and is kind of melting from teh wet, I don’t care. Downside- it is outside.

it’s really tempting to spend a ton on storage boxes with drawers, toolchests etc but tbh the basic inexpensive ones work absolutely as well as the super expensive ones for most people. Ball bearings in the drawers tends to mean that it’s basically of usable quality. Drawer height is important, my first one had loads of drawers and looked super useful but actually anything bigger than a screwdriver was a problem and also stuff was more likely to stick up and jam. My main one these days is all taller drwaers, you get less drawers of course and you do waste space but you gain ease of use and lose irritating stuff.

I have the smaller version of that SGS workbench, I think I paid around £400 for it.

The small draws are great for hand tools and sorting out bits and bobs, but there’s no internal dividers or anything so you have to do your own thing to keep everything in place. I ended up using IKEA kitchen dividers which worked ok.

It looks the mutts nuts but the handles accumulate dust and dirt like no ones business and the worktop quickly gets stained and grubby with use.

The big draws are really limiting as they aren’t really tall or deep enough for power tools. My big circular saw won’t fit for example. It’s also not very easy to move around, while also being quite wobbly when standing still.

That may sound quite negative, but I do like it, it’s just taken more getting used to that I thought it would.

As others have said though, big dug for racking.

whats wrong with an old kitchen? you can often pick then up for free and itll take an afternoon to screw it together. if you can build an ikea bookcase you can put a kitchen together in your garage.

i have a run of old units on one wall, a large homebase (sds) cabinet with drawers on the other. last remaining wall has a heavy duty mdf table made out of old fence posts and ply. its on wheels so i can wheel it outside and the final gap has a single kitchen cabinet on wheels with a worktop offcut. this is a mini worktable that has my bench sander in. everntually i might upgrade it to a router table.

was probably no more than a couple of days to set it up

I built my own workbench across the back of the garage. For shelving I got some of these. Probably the same as all the other shelves that have been mentioned.

So far so good.

https://www.screwfix.com/p/5-tier-galvanised-steel-rivet-shelving-unit-1200mm-x-450mm-x-1800mm/644ph

Garage shelving – Costco do a heavy duty range that is the best I’ve found, only helpful if there’s a branch near you obviously, good value too. It’s Super heavy duty, virtually indestructible.

i also have the SGS 42” rolling cabinet and top box combo. Highly recommended, it’s gone up a bit in price since I bought mine, but quality gear.

for a workbench, I was lucky enough to get a cast off workbench from a woodworking school, proper old school workbench which is actually brilliant.

My workbench was a DIY effort as I had some leftover wood.  2x 12mm OSB with a 6mm marine ply top, glued and screwed together.  Metal worktops are great for clean jobs, not so great if you need to hammer the crap out of something or screw something down as a jig, etc. And the legs/base need to be sturdy enough that I can put some welly into twisting  whatever is  in the vice.

Racking liberated from previous employers skip (I actually gave some to my next employer as I had so much!)

Halfords set of 3 tool chests.

Lots of that slotted metal board that you hang trays off for small parts (which is really expensive so was also liberated from a previous employers skip but really useful).  Much easier to have a pot of old headset parts, or a library of brake pads, tub of old grip collars, tray of brake hose connectors and cable ferules etc to hand than to have to rummage through a big plastic crate of greasy bits.