SingleGarageWorld – layout

Any thoughts on the best way to organise a single garage? I have 3 Steady Racks for the walls to store bikes (more might will be needed). Other things to go in are 2 x free-standing metal shelves about 1m wide, a workbench and a small chest freezer. I like some space for working on a bike, or using a turbo trainer. Also I’d like space to keep a bike ready to go, near to the door for commute/nursery/school run purposes.

I’m wondering is bikes down the side, or bikes on the back wall? Will be installing ground/wall anchors so want to get this right. Other items can be moved around more easily
I have a freestanding bike workstand which does take a up a fair bit of floor space with its legs. Would bench, floor or wall mounted one be better?

Open to any ideas!

Space for a car. Hooks on the roof for hanging three or four bikes over the bonnet.

You’ll need ~1m in front of the bikes to put them on / off racks so cramming them into corners possibly isn’t the best move. Ie if you put them across the back wall, you’ll need to reserve the next 1m of garage space for free space. For this reason, I reckon bikes on the long wall works better. The ‘corridor’ down the length of the garage doubles as space to get the bikes out.

I have a ‘ground’ anchor embedded in the wall which works for me.

Do what I did and ram all you shit in there on day one and then spend the next 12 years reorganising it….

Although you don’t sound to have quite as much unnecessary shit as I have. I mean we have tents to sleep about 25 people and there’s only 4 of us….

Looking from the front I had

bikes on the back,

Work bench then and racking on the right

Nothing on the left to give space to move around and do stuff. work stand was normally here, folded up if I needed space.

I’ve have a bigger garage and now have hooks to store bikes vertically which saves a load of space. The jobs worth hooks from on one are great

I would recommend bikes hanging vertically down a side wall (or both side walls) as close to the door as possible,  so you can get them out easily instead of having to wheel them past everything. If you have an up and over door, that will obviously limit how close to the door you can hang the bikes. If you want to get a bit fancier than simple wall hooks, sliding hooks on a rail give you more flexibility to shuffle things around when hanging or removing bikes or re-organising. You don’t need to go for one of the expensive proprietary systems – have a search in this forum for examples of lower budget solutions using sliding door/curtain hardware.

I have my work bench at the back of the garage, tools mounted on walls, with a lot of my commonly used tools on a home-made tall, narrow wooden cart on wheels, so I can spin it around and move it out of the way when necessary (have a look at Adam Savage’s tool cart on YouTube for inspiration).

An alternative to shelf racking that can free up some floor space is to run a single long shelf below the roof and above the bikes.

To avoid the problem with work stand feet, I use a wall mounted one, but attached to one of those expanding vertical poles that you fit between floor and roof, so I can fit it in the middle of the garage to work on the bike, and then put it in a corner when it is not in use (you can fit bolts sticking out of the ends of the pole so you can securely locate it between holes drilled in a roof joist and the floor, for example).

It is useful to get as much stuff as you can on wheels (e.g. storage cabinets) so you can temporarily move things about to free up space for a specific job, or re-organise (after refitting my garage several times over the years, I realise that you will never get everything in the right place first time!). You can make simple trolleys with bits of wood and large diameter castors and stack large items on top so they don’t form immoveable islands that stop you using your space more flexibly.

Finally, if you have an up and over garage door, replacing it with side hanging doors frees up a lot of useful space and lets you hang those bikes right up to the door. That’s obviously a more involved and expensive job, but worth considering if you are really pushed for space.

I am assuming with all of this that you are not wasting any garage space on a car!

Vertical hanging bikes can work but encroach into the space a lot. I used to do this but gave up due almost no space once you start utilising both sides, too many bikes doesn’t help with a Family. Tried vertical one side and against the wall the other but it still didn’t work.

I now hang road bikes on the wall flat to the wall on a hanger (upside down road bars in a stem mounted on a fork bracketed to wall, finally finding a use for old suspension forks) which keeps them close to the wall but not touching it and a simple lift down. Can be done with a MTB also but they are a lot more awkward to hang and the bracket height would be a lot lower. MTBs mostly stay on the floor against the 2 side walls at the far end of the garage from the man door. Easy to wheel out when needed.

Benches/storage sit next to the MTBs with road bikes above as necessary.

This leaves plenty of free space in the middle of the floor for Turbo set up or moving a work stand around.

I have decluttered the garage of most of my DIY stuff to the loft though.

sliding hooks on a rail give you more flexibility to shuffle things around when hanging or removing bikes or re-organising

There was a thread on this some time ago, does anyone have a link to it please?

has anyone mounted such a sliding rail on a wall rather than the ceiling? does it work?

Planning a hanging rail system for bikes

There’s a link at the end of that thread to another longer thread with more examples.

I used FH Brundle parts:

https://www.fhbrundle.co.uk/sliding-door-gear/max-door-weight-60kg-ibfm

The rollers are designed to hang vertically, but you’ll see brackets on that site that can be used to mount the track on a side wall, rather than screwing it to a roof.  You could attach the roller unit stud to a hanging strip of wood and then screw one of those wall mount bike hooks to that:

E.g. https://www.decathlon.co.uk/p/1-bike-wall-and-ceiling-rack/_/R-p-313305

The advantage of roof mounting is that you can position the track half a wheel diameter from the wall and then just use the cheap red plastic coated hooks joined to the roller stud with a small piece of wood. The bike weight is then hanging directly below the suspension point, so it’s a bit easier to slide them about. Hooks flat against the wall hanging from wall mounted track might actually work better if you only want to move the hooks occasionally, because they should tend to self arrest.

I recently re-did our bike storage using Elfa rails and hooks.

The hooks just pop out, so you can move them around pretty easily. Having rails at two heights gives more options for mounting the bikes closer together. We’ve got growing kids so being able to rearrange storage as the bikes change is handy.

I prefer this to hooks that actually slide about, as that sounds like a recipe for bashing bikes together.

thanks @kcr, that’s great.  Roof in the garage is about 10 foot tall so it’s not out of the question, but not easy to reach that high

We had extra height in the garage so put in a mezzanine floor and stored the bikes against the wall underneath it. It also allowed us to fit security blinds

Also got a foldaway work stand using an old TV wall bracket

Thanks for the ideas!

My thinking now is, workbench across the back wall. There are sockets at workbench height already and the side walls can be used for support. Then keep things down one side as much as possible, with bikes closest to the door.

Regarding the door, there doesn’t seem to be quite the right option available. The driveway is short so the car is close to the door. It’s an internal garage so I want a door that’s well insulated as this will help the whole house.
Side hinged with an offset split, possibly opening inwards, might work. I probably look to never open the larger door so can store items behind it. A sectional door with a wicket door might work too, although the lifting mechanism would rarely be used

Re the door, we’ve got a three way split with middle panel opening inwards on its own individually, middle handle is lockable plus security locks top and bottom. Whole door can be opened with middle and LHS section bi-folding and RHS opening on its own if we need full access

A bit like this?

Do you know who made it?

+1 for bikes on the side wall so the walkway gives you access space.

Put shelves near the door., whichever door you will use most. Otherwise you will just dump stuff on the workbench.

Have big containers/bins for storage.  Don’t be too clever about storage though.  You might think that future you will thank you for such a detailed and organized system.  But between you and that future self lies the near-present-you.  And they will dump whatever is in their hand on the nearest flat surface. It’s them you need to appease,

These do a side hinged foam filled etc door..   can be asymmetric, but do open out.

https://www.teckentrup.co.uk/garage-doors/side-hinged-garage-doors