Garage Overhaul with The Container Store Virtual In-Home Design Service

by admin August 12, 2020

I am a brand ambassador with The Container Store and this blog was written in partnership with them.

As many of you may remember from sneak peeks of my garage over the years, Jon and I had Elfa installed in our garage when we first moved in. The set up worked great for us for a number of years but life happened, things changed in our daily lives, our storage needs evolved and we needed a tweak to the organizational system in the garage. This month I partnered with The Container Store to use their new Virtual In-Home Design service to give our garage a little makeover (or glow up if you will).

I worked with a designer from the Virtual In-Home Design service team and the whole process was so easy! I loved that I was able to work the designer on the space from the comfort of my home - a true plus the days of COVID. The first step in the Virtual In-Home Design process was measuring the space. The Container Store provides a helpful PDF of how to measure your space here. From there I set up a video call with my designer to talk through our setup. The designer worked up our new garage layout in real time so I was able to give feedback and notes live just as if we were meeting in person. See more about the complete Virtual In-Home Design service process here.

One of the most amazing features of the Elfa systems is that unlike other built in solutions, you can easily add, remove and adjust drawers, shelves and other features as your needs change. This meant that my designer and I didn’t have to start from scratch in our garage but could tweak and build on what we already had in place. These are the changes we made to our space to increase functionality and allow our garage to work for our family right now:

After Jon got a new car I had removed several shelves from the right side of our garage and hadn’t been able to figure out what to add to that space since it could not longer be very deep. My designer and I chatted about how since COVID we are no longer bringing our shoes into our mudroom so we decided to add more shoe storage in that space. These here were the perfect way to keep the set up narrow but still maximize that space.
We also added an additional shelf on the right to give us a spot for some a few narrow bins that hold things like tennis balls (you know we are all so into tennis these days!).
We also added an over the door rack to the left side of the stairs. Elfa products are so versatile that we were able to mount the over the door rack to the wall and the baskets are just perfect for what we need in the space now. We use these shelves for Poppy's items and summer essentials we need close at like sunscreen and bug spray and flip flops. We have also been using one of the baskets of the over the door rack to store scissors and tape as we have been opening all packages outside since COVID. What is so wonderful about this system is that when life goes back to normal and we can bring packages inside or summer ends and we no longer need a gallon of sunscreen each day we can tweak the setup to function for our new needs.
We also added another top track with bike hooks to the original garage designs as we now have two big girl bikes (errr woman - I can’t believe my babies have full sized bikes!) and we needed a spot for the bikes to be stored in the winter when they are no longer in use.
Finally, Elfa Is so versatile that I was able to use the system we already had but added more utility hooks to hold more items that we want to keep in the garage like ladders, tennis rackets, shovels, etc.

I linked up EVERYTHING that we used in our garage both the makeover and the original space below. The Container Store has a great selection of products to complete your Elfa space that the bins are just as important to finessing the organization as the built in themselves. It feels so good to have the garage all organized and I could not have done it so easily without The Container Store’s new Virtual In-Home Design service. Schedule an appointment to start working on your garage, closet, pantry, you name it here.