You can buy garden-variety garage cabinets at any of the big-box stores, like Lowe’s, Home Depot, Sears or Builder’s Square. Garage cabinets can be pretty basic and utilitarian. But what if you want your garage to have some style? In that case, you will probably want to buy something more than the functional-yet-simple garage cabinets the aforementioned retailers offer. The good news is: you’re in luck! There are a bevy of specialty garage storage solutions available that offer all sorts of cool components.
Many of these specialty systems can be discovered online. With a bit of digging, you can discover systems that are quite unusual, some of them really unique. One wall of cabinets, with drawers, a workbench, a back-panel pegboard with tool holders and overhead cabinets might cost $3000, but it really LOOKS great. Before you buy however, you need to consider the full range of pros and cons.
The pros are clear. Your garage cabinets might reflect real beauty, even elegance. You can be proud of your garage. The quality of materials, design and workmanship are often quite high. Especially if you have chosen a module designed for a particular purpose — like a drawer to house a socket wrench set — you can be sure it will work well for that purpose.
But the cons of these garage storage ideas are also easily observed. These sorts of storage systems are often hideously expensive. While many of the designs embrace conventional standards, some of them rely on their own, unique standards –- e.g., garage cabinets with mounts at 18” centers and not at the more traditional 16” centers.
Because a specialty set of cabinets is, well, special, it may not work well with other systems. That’s another con, especially if you want to match one module from one manufacturer with another component from a different manufacturer.
The last con has to do with after-market support. Unlike many consumer products, garage cabinets last a really long time. Unless the manufacturer has serious staying power, you may not be able to purchase parts or complementary units in the years following your initial purchase. If you need to change things over timer –- and most families do — you may find the system you so lovingly installed in your garage is now “discontinued” and you need to either add something clearly out of placenor replace ALL your garage storage units. And that, my friend, is a major “con,” perhaps on many levels.