Tiny garage in The Netherlands

[Dennis Cavallino]

Let me introduce myself here, but I'll start with the garage. Last year we bought our house, located in a typical Dutch neighbourhood. It has a one-car garage attached to it. Small (just 2,85 x 6,00 metres), but I'm fond it has a garage at all.

The previous owner had already installed central heating, 2 water taps, electricity, an alarm system, and some cabinets. He'd left the garage bare as it was. It's built with bricks (cavity wall), a concrete floor and has a wooden ceiling. Pretty basic. That's why I thought to make it quite minimalistic. I love modern architecture and design...

But after reading this thread here: http://garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=32636
And saw this picture:

I changed my mind and started to change my small garage into a little vintage/retro workshop. I bought a vintage green and gray paint for the walls and just got started.

Here you can see how it was (white bricks turning into gray and the green colour behind the bench was white plasterboard)
Edit: Photo link is dead

As you can see, I installed a wooden working bench in the back (2,85 metres wide, 0,80 metres deep, 1 metre high. It's quite stable, although it hasn't got any table-legs. The bench is made of 38mm boards from a scaffold I used during the renovation of our house. On top of that lays a 18mm triplex plate. It's painted white (2 ground layers and 3 layers of paint). It works for me and didn't cost me a thing. All the stuff I used, were left-overs from our renovation.

Right now I have to do the floor. It's bare concrete. It's gray and dark, so I want to turn it into white, by using cheap concrete paint which a friend of mine has used on his garage floor. Otherwise I'll use epoxy. But I'm not sure yet. We'll see.

Best regards,

Dennis

 

[aqr81]

Hey Dennis, welcome to the GJ. Yes, Jack has motivated many folks here in the community. There are may small garages her from which you can gather some ideas. What you've done so far looks good. Keep the updates coming.

Larry

 

[eyeboltman]

Cool nice to get in side no matter what size it is . cool garage!!! Is that a craftman tool box ??? eyeboltman

 

[abstamaria]

Wonderful home and garage, Dennis. I think you made the right decision on the style. Why not put in ceramic tiles like Jack Olsen did in the thread you liked? Tiles might be just as or proably less expensive than epoxy and are less complicated to install. Jack has a thread in the floor section that's very convincing in favor of tile. Good luck, and yes post more pictures. It would be interesting to see the inside of the house too.

 

[rickycobra]

What are these metres you speak about? haha jk Smaller garages are always the interesting because they use their space a lot more efficiently. Look forward to this build.

 

[Catamount]

Awesome! I love reading about small garages in Europe.

 

[Ron Lombardo]

Dennis ... where you located in Netherlands ... my close friend is an electrician out of Arnhem. I also spent about 3 years on and off visiting netherlands

Ron

 

[Thumper]

Dennis....it might be small compared to some on here but I got a feeling yours will be awesome when you get it done. I can't wait to see the finished product.

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

Thank you guys.

Andres, tiles will be a good solution, although I did some tiling in my bathroom and it was hard to get the job done. Escpecially the sawing. That was a large hard stone, small ceramic will be easier I suppose. Maybe I'll give it a shot.

Eyeboltman, the craftman toolbox is Jack's.

Ron, I live in a place called 'Alphen aan den Rijn', it's located in the middle of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague (all of these cities are a 30 min. drive away). Where did you stay? Arnhem is a great place. It's a bit like San Francisco with the hills, trolley-buses and a good imagination.

I started my personal introduction here: http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1089022

More pictures will follow soon. Didn't have time yet.

 

[Jack Olsen]

Wow. I'm very flattered, Dennis. I think you got the green just right, too.

I like the bench very much. That place is going to have a lot of character to it when it's done.

If you look at the thread on one-car and two-car garages, you'll see some great ideas for ways to maximize the space you have.

It's probably not important, but here are more-recent pictures of my garage. Most of what used to be there changed as I went through the place at the beginning of this year. But who knows, maybe some people would prefer the previous version?

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

Jack, I just like both of them.

I see you replaced your wooden cabinet in the back (right side) by one of craftwork (?). I like the combination of old and (timeless) new stuff and did almost the same thing.

Last week I bought 7 2nd hand drawer units on casters (Ikea Helmer) for just 70 euros in total, a great deal. I had one already with foam on the bottom of each tray. This solves the problem, all my stuff will shuffle while opening or closing trays.

The drawer unit just stood there under my working bench, but didn't find a good way to store all my stuff. Right now, with 8 of these units in total it's amazing how much space I've left and that makes me happy in my tiny 1-car garage. It looks good too.

I'll take some pictures tomorrow.

Today I was also working on a good wall (of fame) for my collection of Carel Godin de Beaufort stuff (memorablia, scale models, books, trophies, posters, photo's and other stuff). I don't want my entire garage to look like a museum. It has to be a garage at first, but there's no other room in the house which is better suited to place all this stuff than the garage. Hopefully one day, I'll add one of his racing cars. Those are more valuable than my house, but who cares?

A couple of weeks back, I installed my espresso machine. I'm looking for a vintage amplifier (Sansui) and wooden speakers (B&W). I have this set-up in my living room and like the quality. With my netbook of Iphone attached, I like to use the program Spotify. I love to listen to my favourite workshop-playlist (Johnny Cash, Stones, Jamiroquai, Nina Simone etc.).

I was in a restaurant today, which had a beamer and projector screen set up in a retro atmosphere. Within a split second I was thinking of placing a beamer and screen above my garage door, so I can watch old racing (like Le Mans and Grand Prix) and car-chase movies while I'm working or relaxing there. I can place a pull down projector screen easy above the entrance.

With my car inside, it'll be just like a drive in movie theatre. lol

You see, although it's small, I'm going to make the best out of it.

Cheers,

Dennis

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

Finally some updates. It's not the biggest, the most beautiful and definitely not the largest garage on GJ, but I'm happy with the progress I made last couple of weeks. So it was time to share some stories and pictures with you. Because you always inspire me on your projects. GJ is amazing.

Why didn't you hear from my garage since 2010? Well... you know... years pass by, you get some kids, you buy and sell some companies... Anyway time flies and I was too busy the last couple of years to do the things I really wanted to do on my garage. It became some sort of hoarders place. Although we used the garage a lot between 2009 and 2012. As a garage. We stored the car (MX-5 or our Mini Classic) at night inside, I did some maintenance and repairs on our cars (Jeep XJ, Saab 900 Classic, BMW E30 325i racer...) et cetera. Somehow, till then, it was my kind of happy place. Not that practical, but it did the trick. Nothing special.

But then things got out of hand and my little man cave somehow became a big mess. You know how these things go. You have a party, put all the stuff from the living room in the garage to clean up quickly and you close the door of the garage, so everything is out of sight. Repeat this once in a while and you are one of those guys who actually don't want to open the garage doors anymore, because of all the sh*t inside. This happened to me. The parties where great though! We had plenty!! Haha.

Ever since I found GJ on the web I had tons of ideas to make one hell of a man cave out of a tiny garage, but since all the stuff moved in I had no motivation to actually start on a project this size again. First I had to get rid of stuff. A pile of stuff. As you can imagine, I left the door closed.

This bothered me a lot. I couldn't use my tools, because I couldn't reach my workbench without moving toys and furniture around. It was like tile style puzzling, but my tiles where packed with even more tiles (here and there even literally).

My to do list in and around the house became longer and longer. It was getting annoying. So I took two weeks off and now the garage is starting to be a man cave again. We got rid of all the stuff we didn't use. 4 car loads later and we could see the floor again!

This is how the garage looked like after removing most of the stuff. Still too much car books on the shelves. But how can you have too much car books? Right.

Result: This tiny garage is now more practical for myself and my fellow housemembers. I love the garage again! And so do my kids. Mrs Cavallino also likes it, although she misses me on the couch at night while watching Netflix. Hehe.

The kids love their play zone

I created this small play room in the garage for our kids. So it is now 1/2 workshop and 1/2 playground. The major upgrade is that I created a functional storage space on the attic and this helped me to create my home office there as well.

This was the attic after we removed everything.

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

So back to last Christmas. First of all, after removing everything it was time to put nice floors in both the garage below and the attic. I choose heavy duty laminate flooring with aluminium underflooring for extra insulation. Magnus Walker has laminate flooring, so why don't I, right?! Is still want to put a car in the garage once in a while, but now we can walk into the garage on our socks. The garage is connected to our entrance hall. So it's two steps from the living room into the garage, which is quite ideal.

I did the floor upstairs first:

Storage space for camping gear:

I used these rollers and it works great:

The system I used is called Storemax H40. I opted for the "hanging" (H in H40) doors instead of rails on the floor. You can slide the doors with one fingertip.

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

In my workshop I could move around again. So I put back everything in place. I use these IKEA Hemler cabinets for tools, hardware and I use the drawers as trays for many projects. Quite practical! I take a drawer out, use the tray while working on the project. Most of the time I use 2 or 3 trays somewhere in the garage or in the house (one with bolts, one with nuts, one with tools... something like that). I bought these Helmer cabinets for cheap 2nd hand after I say Jack Olsen's garage thread (7 years ago). His setup (Craftsman) reminded me somehow of these red office cabinets.

I still didn't regret it. I combined 4 on each side by adding a piece of wood on top. They can roll into the garage, which I don't normaly do, but when the floor had to be empty it was quite handy to roll them into the front of the house for a day.

On top of the cabinets are other tools stored. On the workbench is my grinder, my drill and one vise. I have a bigger vise which I most of the time bolt onto my Workmate.

It works for me.

This is my basic setup. I use my Black & Decker Workmate a lot (but I'm getting a BW825 soon, which is even more practical and the new one has rubber to protect the laminate flooring). After putting everything back into the garage I did some reorganizing. So I have to make new pictures.

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

Here's a picture while I was working on the laminate flooring. You can see how I use my Helmer tray with laminate tools inside while I was working on this project.

Another Ikea item is the grey garage cart (or trolley as we call it here). I had a lightblue Hazet Assistant trolley, which was pretty cool and vintage. But prices went up, so I sold it to buy new tools (is that okay with you?!). This Ikea trolley fits underneath the workbench and suits me better than the Hazet. The Hazet is great when you want to take it with you in the back of your trunk, which I haven't done once, because it folds down with all your tools inside. It's also better to use a Hazet because it has a rubber strip around its trays to prevent dents on your car or something. But for me, this works well.

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

We already had a swing in the garage, but now nothings stands in our way.

 

[jgschroeder99]

Another Ikea item is the grey garage cart (or trolley as we call it here). I had a lightblue Hazet Assistant trolley, which was pretty cool and vintage. But prices went up, so I sold it to buy new tools (is that okay with you?!).

That's a great idea. I did something similar recently with some USA made 3/8" drive Craftsman ratchets (a thin profile and a premium). I had so many ratchets that I barely ever used them, and they sold on eBay very quickly for a good price. This allowed me to buy a couple new tools that I wanted.

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

Tnx Jason. You make someone happy with it too. The Hazet toolcart was sold to a girl who wanted it as a gift for her boyfriend.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-G901F met Tapatalk

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

A while ago I took some tools to work. We had some track days and several of our rent-a-racecar's where transported by ourselves. I put my stuff in our hauler / ramp truck. Unfortunately the lockable boxes on the side wheren't locked by a collegue and one of my toolboxes fell out (I guess). It wasn't my most expensive ones, but I missed it the moment I found out about it. Luckily my other sets didn't fell off the truck.

On our local classified advertisements website I found this set for cheap. 30 Euros including shipping. Retail price is around 170.

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

Today I started to paint a wall on the attic of my tiny garage.

I really didn't like the old white building bricks with the dark grey jointing. Just like in the garage below I wanted to paint these walls. This time I choose the colour our daughter has on the walls in her bedroom. It's not plain white, the paint contains a bit of green or blue. Depending on the light and also if you are male (blue it is!) or female (green they say)!

I have to do another layer, the lady says. She's better in painting than I am so I will do that... Electricity was already there. The PO had a workbench there and used to work on model planes untill his death.

Instead of another workbench I wanted to use this part of the attic for writing, but I also wanted it to become the man cave I had in mind for a long time. I like danish vintage design. It's timeless. I use a wall mounted modular shelf system that I'll have to build myself. It will contain my writer's desk and bookshelves. The metal system was delivered in satin black. I have to get the shelves later on, when I have done all measuring.


Here's a nice example of the style I like for my office. This one is designed by Jean Prouvé, in 1948. He's one of the greatest French designers IMHO.

This was the Idea I had for this wall. Due to the roofline I had to create something myself. Hopefully it will become a nice vintage looking workspace with all my favourite books, model cars, some artwork and my vintage Marantz HiFi system at reach.

A collegue at the race track in Zandvoort already gave me his vintage brown leather office chair. I can sit in that chair all day long. But first I'll have to finish this job!

 

[Dennis Cavallino]

I had to find a way to align the 2nd upright of the rack, because the electrical conduit was in the way to use my level properly. And then I got the idea to install the hooks. Easy does it.