It’s normal to keep a few secrets from your family during the holiday season. You need a place to hide your stocking stuffers, room to assemble those much-wanted toys so that your kids can play with them right away, instead of waiting for you to assemble them after unwrapping, and a place to wrap gifts without being disturbed. With a little work, your garage might be the perfect place for the holiday elf in your home to get ready for the upcoming holiday.
Santa’s Workbench
Even if you don’t get to use it as often as you’d like during the rest of the year, a good wooden, stainless steel, or Formica workbench can really come in handy during the holiday season. If you’re creative and good with tools, you may want to use it as a place to make homemade toys and gifts. Even if you’d rather just buy gifts from the store, it’s hard to avoid buying gifts that don’t require at least some assembly. This is especially true for children’s toys, from dollhouses to bicycles, but even some adult “toys” require work with a hammer or a screwdriver before they’re ready to present with a bow on Christmas morning.
In addition to having a clean and organized workbench, it’s a good idea to make sure that the lighting in the garage is in good shape before you begin. Working in the dark isn’t easy to do, and without good lighting, you may find that your gifts aren’t put together quite as well as you might look. If you have good lighting over a sturdy workbench, you have the perfect place to put together your Christmas gifts.
Present Wrapping Station
For some people, wrapping presents is fun. For others, it’s one of the more tedious chores of the holiday season. If you dislike wrapping presents, you may be able to lighten your load by having them wrapped at the department store or the mall, or by having an online retailer wrap them before shipping. However, you’re probably going to have to wrap at least a few of them yourself.
Creating a wrapping station in the garage can be the easiest way to get the present wrapping out of the way. Storing the wrapping paper, a pair of scissors, and a supply of tape in the garage, away from the main living area, can help ensure that nobody disappears with your supplies or wrinkles the wrapping paper before you’re done with all of the gift wrapping. Plus, the rest of the family is less likely to walk in on you while you’re wrapping.
Hidden Gifts
Wrapped or unwrapped, assembled or disassembled, you will need to keep the presents away from prying eyes as long as possible. Luckily, a garage provides plenty of space, which is why it’s often used for storage to begin with.
Of course, it’s not enough to just set the presents on the garage in plain sight. If you have a set of garage cabinets, those can be a good place to store presents, especially if you can lock the cabinets, to prevent anyone else from sneaking a peak. If you have curious kids and no locks on the cabinets, overhead storage bins that slide into racks in your garage ceiling can be a great place to hide presents from even the most determined snoops.
Setting your garage up to be your own personal Santa’s workshop may be the best way to make sure that you can prepare for the holidays the way that you want to. For help turning your garage into more useful space, contact us for a free design consultation and estimate.{{cta(‘4e0ca529-46da-44c8-acce-dd815d6ec4bc’,’justifycenter’)}}
