This shop is part of a social shopper marketing insight campaign with Weave Made Media® and Rubbermaid, but all my opinions are my own. #weavemade #FastTrack http://my-disclosur.es/RgFrEH
Spring has sprung. And believe it or not, Allie and I (with a little help from the kids) actually did a bit of spring cleaning in the garage a few weeks ago. You can tell from the photo above, right?
Yeah, we’re still a bit disorganized. This is actually the clean side of the cluttered garage that leads to the door into the house. It somehow manages to quickly get filled up with bulk items like paper towels, tissues, 12-packs of soda, cartons of water bottles, etc. I’ve always wanted to have our garage completely done up. Not just painting the walls but putting up organizer tracks all along the walls to hang up everything in its rightful place. I wish I had Garage OCD so I’d have no choice but to make it happen.
For now, I’ll very slowly tackle things one area at a time. I recently hit our local Target and picked up a Rubbermaid FastTrack 5pc kit so I can get my garage organizing on track… uh, fast!
Now you all know (or do now) that I’m the most least handy person on the planet. I can hang up blinds and pictures in the house and that’s about it. Even those take forever and there’s a fairly good chance something will break and I’l curse like a sailor and end up buying loads of spackle for some reason or other.
So could I handle installing the Rubbermaid FastTrack 5 piece organizer in my garage? The suspense is killing you now, isn’t it?
Okay, the short answer is: “Yes.” In the end, I managed to hang this sucker up without bringing the house down around me. Were there some complications? Of course, but those were my usual faults, not Rubbermaid’s at all.
Let me walk you through my work!
The best part about the Rubbermaid FastTrack 5pc organizer is that when you take it out of the box… there aren’t that many pieces at all! To install, it’s really just about hanging up one piece of metal with a lot of holes in it.
The instructions are real straight forward. It shows you where you need to put the screws, as well as where you need to include wall anchors for added support.
As long as you can find the studs in your wall, you will have absolutely no problem hanging this puppy up. And, uh, unfortunately, that’s the only part I had some initial trouble with. I have an electronic stud finder and I used it to find the three studs necessary to hang the FastTrack bracket.
See, I got it up no problem!
Except, uh, yeah, my hand is covering up a little mishap I had. My stud finder claimed I had the right areas, but when I pre-drilled a few holes, I went right through the drywall into air. It worked for two out of the three holes fine. I figured I somehow did the stud-finding wrong (obviously), so I tried again and shifted everything a little to the right.
Even with shifting the bracket over, the holes on the left were still not into the stud. The other ones were fine though, so I went ahead and just chalked it all up to my walls being magical and having missing studs. Luckily, the Rubbermaid FastTrack set included a few extra wall anchors, so I just used those for the left side of the bracket.
Normally, drywall anchors are cheap little plastic ones that never work and everything comes ripping out of the wall. I usually use these crazy metal ones I have, but I figured I’d give Rubbermaid’s a shot here.
I have to say, these anchors were fantastic! They’re the butterfly kind, so you fold them, hammer them into a pre-drilled hole and then just pop them open with a special “key” that’s included in the set. They really worked great and I had them all up in no time.
Your next step is sliding on the FastTrack cover and then you’re basically done. Yeah, that’s really all there is to it!
That’s it! I did it. Woo hoo! The set includes four pieces to attach to the FastTrack for hanging. There are 2 curved hooks, 1 flat hook, and 1 double hook.
The hooks just snap right into place and can easily be removed, as well as slide left and right with ease. The hardest part for me at this point was figuring out how and what exactly to hang up! I did a little thinking and then came up with a pretty nice solution that got the ladder and chairs out of the way first, as well as the broom. We have a long extension cord shoved in the other corner of the garage, so it’ll be great to have easy access to that, especially since the outlet is right near the FastTrack now.
Next, I put the recycle bins right in front of all that stuff so they were out of the way. Jason’s bike can now go in front of it all too, leaving fairly easy access to it all. Yes, we still need a bit more organizing, but considering how easy this was to install, I think a few more Rubbermaid FastTracks will really help give us back a lot more of our garage so it won’t feel like I’m running an obstacle course race every time I walk into the house.
If you’d like to give Rubbermaid FastTrack a shot, your timing couldn’t be better! The Rubbermaid FastTrack 5 piece Kit is currently on sale at Target for just $28.89 (regularly $33.99). The sale is available in stores only from May 18 through May 24, so hurry!
Is your garage a disaster?
Wow that was easy!
I am not allowed in our garage LOL. It’s the workshop. My husband loves it out there so much he BUILT, from scratch, a metal woodburning stove. It looks like a cremation stove.
Well, the cremation part may not be cool, but the metal woodburning stove built from scratch sounds awesome! I really want to be able to do stuff like that but I am soooo not handy.
Lol love the oops. I think my husband has done that a time or two. I like the hooks on that one. I have the ones you that you can buy pretty much everywhere.