Home makeover craze hits the garage

By: Katherine Salant: Inman News
Over the last 20 years every room in a typical suburban house has been transformed to some degree.

The only one to escape home builders' attention has been the garage, but the enterprising folks at Whirlpool and Sears now offer you the opportunity to organize it, accessorize it, or go the whole nine yards and undertake a complete maker-over. After a recent fact-finding trip to my local Sears store, I concluded that there is now a solution to nearly every garage gripe you could imagine. Moreover, these solutions are projects that any homeowner can undertake and, carried to their most extreme, won't cost more than about $3,400.

The easiest project offers the most immediate gratification because it will bring order out of chaos. You can gather up the jumble of unpacked boxes, sports equipment, and gardening tools that make every arrival and departure from your otherwise perfect new house so unsettling and put them on easy-to-assemble shelving units.

Durashelf 's $45, 36-inch-long plastic shelving system holds 150 pounds per shelf. Should you have a lot of really heavy items, say an engine block or many boxes crammed with books, Do+Able's $65, 36-inch-long shelving system holds an astounding 1,000 pounds per shelf. Both units are 18-inches deep. In most garages, they will easily fit on the side wall of a parking bay and still leave enough room to get in and out of your car.

Moving from stuff to food stuffs and bulk-purchase grocery shopping, the next garage gripe on your list may be the old refrigerator you have in there that runs all the time, costs a fortune to operate and doesn't work well. In this case the problem is not your refrigerator, it's where you put it ? an unconditioned space. Whirlpool has a solution ? a refrigerator and freezer that is designed to function in a garage.

Unbeknownst to most consumers, Whirlpool refrigeration engineer Travis Perkins explained, a standard refrigerator is designed to operate in the 55 to 100 degree range of your interior conditioned space, not the extreme temperatures of your unheated, un-air conditioned garage where the mercury can go as low as 0 degrees or as high as 110 degrees.

While most people might suspect that a refrigerator wouldn't work well at 0 degrees, its performance begins to decline when room temperature falls below 50 degrees, Perkins said. At 40 degrees a refrigerator's thermostat stops signaling the unit to turn on, and the freezer also shuts off because it only runs when the refrigerator does. After a few days of 40-degree weather, the frozen food will begin to thaw and spoil. In many parts of the country, this situation will prevail all winter if your garage is attached because the space will capture some of the heat from your house and the temperature will never fall below freezing.

Should the temperature of your garage eventually fall below 25 degrees, food in the freezer will remain frozen, but items in the refrigerator will also freeze. At the other extreme, when the temperature soars over 100, the refrigerator goes into "overdrive," constantly running to keep food chilled and frozen, but not adequately. A typical symptom of this condition is softened ice cream, Perkins said.

A refrigerator that works well in a typical garage situation is no small feat of engineering, and its manufacture is expensive, said Perkins. Whirlpool's 19-cubic-foot Chillerator (a refrigerator with a small freezer on top) is $1,000, and its Freezerator (a 21-cubic-foot unit with a freezer below and a smaller unit on top that can be either a refrigerator or a freezer) is $1,100. Whirlpool also makes a small $450 Beer Box that holds 35 12-ounce cans of soda or beer. All three are on casters, and the small one fits under a workbench.

Segueing from the practical to serious makeover, both Sears and Whirlpool offer a workstation ensemble that will make a garage work area look coordinated and finished instead of like a handy man's hodge-podge. Sears' Craftsman Professional and Whirlpool's Gladiator include a workbench, and steel cabinetry ? a 5-drawer base and a base cabinet on casters that you can move right next to your car when you're working on it (otherwise both base units fit neatly under the workbench), a tall, standing cabinet, and wall cabinets. Another plus with both systems ? the wall cabinets can be easily attached and detached, making the entire ensemble portable and easy to stow on a moving van, should you relocate at some point in the future. The crowning touch: plastic floor tiles or plastic roll flooring that make the space look and feel like a room and not a garage.

Not being one to spend any time at a workbench myself, I invited three Ann Arbor, Mich., friends with expertise in this area to evaluate the Sears Professional and Whirlpool Gladiator products: Greg George, a carpenter/remodeler; Dick Vail, a professional handyman/mechanical engineer/remodeler; and Ernie Weaver, an auto mechanic/wood working hobbyist.

My team's conclusion: for the weekend auto mechanic or the person who likes to build or repair small things (for example, fix a lamp or help with a child's science project), the system will work well. For the serious woodworker, the workbench and storage units are not big enough. Woodworking tools are bigger than auto repair tools and would not fit easily into either 5-drawer base unit. If you routinely use large pieces of wood (to make furniture or repair a door, for example), you need a much bigger, freestanding workbench. Another downside of woodworking that can make it an unacceptable garage activity regardless of any particulars is the sawdust that gets all over everything. The floor tiles looks nice, but practically speaking, the only spot where they are sensible is right in front of the workbench, if you anticipate standing for long periods.

The main differences between the Sears Craftsman Professional and the Whirlpool Gladiator ensembles are aesthetics and price. Both are tastefully designed in a monochromatic combination of metallic grey, black and silver. Sears' cabinetry features rounded edges and catchy rubber drawer pulls that look like car door handles. The rounded "zero-edge" corners on all the cabinetry make it easy to open the doors, even when the unit is next to a wall, and the cabinet doors have shallow shelves for storing small items. The workbench surface is sealed MDF board, which is easily cleaned if auto grease gets on it.

Gladiator's silver cabinet doors and drawer fronts feature a raised tread plate pattern that adds a masculine touch. The doors are inset and also easy to open if the unit is next to a wall. The workbench surface is maple butcher block, which may seem inappropriate for a garage workstation, but Weaver, a professional auto mechanic, said, "If it gets dirty, it looks like you're doing something."

Couching the aesthetic choices in terms of cars, Weaver and I agreed that the rounded look of the Sears Professional workstation would likely appeal to the owner of a Chrysler PT Cruiser or Pacifica, while the squared off Gladiator look would be more appealing to the owner of a more traditional-looking car like a BMW sedan or a Volvo station wagon.

The cost of the two workstation ensemble systems with an 8-foot workbench differs by $313; the total for the Gladiator is $2,273, for the Craftsman Professional $1,860. This price includes a 3-foot-wide tile floor in front of the workstation. A Whirlpool Chillerator and 2 Do+Able shelf storage units would add another $1,130. These prices are all "manufacturers suggested retail prices," but the garage storage systems market is very competitive and markdowns are common.

A final tip: before you get very far with your garage makeover in your new house, make sure that the system will fit. Mark Marymee of Pulte Homes said their average size two-car garage is 21 feet by 21 feet. Leaving 1 foot between the rear of your car and the garage door, you would have about 3 feet between the front of your car and the workbench if your car is the size of a Ford Focus station wagon, 2 feet if it's the size of a Ford Explorer or a Ford Taurus, 15 inches if it's the size of a Ford minivan, but only 3 or 4 inches if its as big as a Ford Crown Victoria.

For more information:
Whirlpool's Gladiator Garage Works: www.GladiatorGW.com
Sears' Craftsman Professional garage work station: www.Sears.com; on the home-page search feature, first click on tools, then write in "garage storage"
Questions or queries? Katherine Salant can be contacted at www.katherinesalant.com.