Get your garden supplies in order with my DIY gardening station! Today I’m sharing before and after photos of my latest organization project!

I am so excited to share this project with y’all today! As we have been slowly moving in and unpacking at our new house, we have been trying to tackle mostly organizational DIY projects around the home. First up, the garage is in need of some serious love! We are fortunate enough to have a 3-car garage in this house, and so we will be using the third garage space as my husband’s “workshop/woodworking/working on Sarah’s projects” area. 😀 But, in order to start on the multitude of indoor projects I have up my sleeve, we have to have an organized garage. Several weekends ago I tackled one portion of it: the gardening center!

Related: Before and After: A DIY Powder Room Remodel

This bookshelf was a piece of furniture left behind by my husband’s former roommate when we lived in our old house. We kept it because it is a good sturdy piece of furniture and was perfect for storing supplies in our garage.

Normally in a DIY project, I take before and after photos. However, I conveniently reformatted my camera’s memory card prior to transferring those before pictures to my computer, so… here are the after photos! The cabinet is made from pine, and was initially a very bright, natural colored piece. However, I decided to paint it to cover up some of the dinks, nicks, and stains that had accumulated on its surfaces after a few years of hanging out in our garage.

We plan to paint the exterior walls and trim of our house eventually, and so when I was choosing the paint color I wanted it to reflect that same palette. When it comes to paint colors, I really have gravitated towards Magnolia Market and Benjamin Moore paint colors. For this project, I chose a dark charcoal gray Benjamin Moore color called Iron Mountain, as it is likely the color we plan to paint our exterior trim eventually. I absolutely love this color for this project: it helps hide all of the imperfections in this piece and makes an old bookcase feel like a brand new gardening center!

Related: Our Home: The Finished DIY Basement Pantry

The bookcase required two coats of paint with a few touchups of certain areas afterwards (that detailing at the top was particularly tedious to cover, but I really love how charming it makes the shelving unit look!

After the painting was finished, it was time to stock up on organization and gardening products!

1. First, I needed to sort out the things that had been stored in the garage.
2. Then, I took stock of all of our gardening items. We had lots of “odds and ends” bags of fertilizer, dirt, plant food, and other gardening products. We had purchased some cute pastel colored gardening gloves from Costco several years ago, but over the summers you lose a glove here and there, and they needed replacing.
3. Decide what you need! In addition to the gardening gloves, we’d had a random amalgamation of watering cans over the years that had somehow either disappeared or ended up with holes in them, and so we needed a new watering can (and a cute one at that, since I usually dread having to water plants every day!). And lastly, I wanted some sort of basket or cart that I could put all my gardening items in and take with me out into the yard.
4. Then comes the most fun part: shopping! (Okay maybe the second most fun, because I just love assembling everything when it all gets delivered!) Based on the items you have and the items you need (see #1 above), you should come up with a list of what you need to purchase. In our case , I wanted a new watering can, a cart or basket for in-yard gardening items, some new gardening gloves, and baskets to hold all our bagged gardening supplies. Be sure to look around at several different retailers (for example I searched Amazon, Overstock, Target, Joss & Main, and Wayfair primarily for my items) to find exactly the items that work best for your space.
5. Lastly, assemble everything! When purchasing my organization items, I measured everything to make sure it would fit and that it would contain all of the items we needed stored. I like to draw a sketch of it out on graph paper to get an idea of where each item will go and to ensure I am not forgetting any items that need to be stored in the unit. This makes assembling the whole gardening center a snap since I already have the overall concept in mind, and I can just tweak things here and there depending on how it looks in person.

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