A car guy garage is a working room that happens to look good. The car lives in it, but so do the tools, the fluids, the jack and the winter wheels. The difference between a garage you enjoy and one you tolerate is usually the order the work was done in, not how much was spent.
Nine upgrades, in the order they should happen. The floor runs $6 to $10 per square foot installed and most of these jobs are 2 to 5 days on site. Garage Designs of St. Louis has been building them in Fenton and across the metro since 2002.
- Floor first, because everything else mounts above it.
- Get the floor clear, with walls and ceiling taking the load.
- Light and heat, which decide whether it gets used from November to March.
- The car-specific parts last, once the room itself works.
Short on time? The floor is the one thing that has to go first, because everything else mounts to walls and ceilings above it. Start with the floor or call 314-308-7780 for a free in-home estimate.
1. The floor, before anything else
Bare concrete dusts, stains and holds every drop of oil you spill. A coated floor wipes instead of being swept, and brake fluid and gasoline come off it rather than soaking in. Installed, that is $6 to $10 per square foot, and which end you land on depends on whether a moisture barrier and a second topcoat are in the build. The full price breakdown is on the interiors page. The build is a diamond grind, crack repair, a Floorguard HyperBond base coat, a full flake broadcast and an Aspartic 85 polyaspartic topcoat, with a limited lifetime residential warranty.
It goes first for a practical reason. Grinding a slab after the cabinets are in means masking everything and working around it, and concrete dust gets into all of it.
2. Get the clutter off the floor
Floor space is the whole point of the room. Every bag of salt and folding chair on the ground is space the car cannot use, and space you cannot walk around the car in. Slatwall takes the bulk of it: grooved PVC panels across the studs, with hooks and brackets that slide anywhere along the groove and move whenever the layout needs to change. Depending on the tier, the panels carry 75 to 450 lbs per square foot.
What goes overhead is what you touch twice a year. Winter wheels, a roof box, the Christmas bins. Overhead racks are 14-gauge powder-coated steel rated 300 to 800 lbs each, and they bolt into the joists, clear of the garage door track.
3. Light it properly, not brightly
One bulb on the opener throws a single shadow across the whole room, and that shadow is always where you are working. Put the light on a grid, recessed cans or LED shop fixtures, and the shadow has nowhere to sit. Then run a strip under the cabinets so the bench itself is lit. Under a hood, a shadow is the difference between finding the leak and not.
We install lighting and electrical roughly 12 times a year, about once a month. There is more in our guide to garage lighting.
4. Make it usable in February
A St. Louis garage is unheated, uninsulated and about as cold as the driveway. That is fine for parking and useless for working, which is why most car projects stall in November. Insulation, drywall and paint is the fix. That work comes up 2 to 3 times a month here, always inside a bigger remodel, and the drywall on its own usually takes at least a week.
If you want it genuinely comfortable rather than just tolerable, a ductless mini split heats and cools the space. We install those once or twice a year, so it is a real option rather than a common one.
5. Design around the car, not the room
This is where most car guy garage plans come unstuck. Measure the door swing before you place anything. In most two-car garages the door arc, not the wall length, decides where cabinets can physically go, and a run that looks fine on paper stops the driver door opening. Same for the bench: put it where you can still walk behind the car with the door up.
6. Protect what is parked in it
Two cars in a two-car garage means door edges meet walls and each other. Slatwall takes the bikes and the yard tools off the side walls so there is clearance where the doors open, and the flake finish on the floor hides the tire marks that show on plain gray coatings.
7. Put the tools where you can see them
A drawer is where a tool goes to be lost. Open storage on slatwall, with a countertop across the cabinet run as the bench, means you can see what you own. Cabinets are for the things that should not be on show: fluids, paint, anything with children in the house. Custom cabinets are built to the length of the wall, so they use the whole run instead of leaving a gap at the end.
8. Let it look like yours
The last ten percent is what makes it your garage rather than a tidy one. Flake color is chosen from real samples in your own garage under your own lighting, because a chip that looks right in a showroom rarely looks the same under LED. Cabinet color, wall color and where the signs and the stools go are the cheap part. Get the floor, the storage and the light right and the personality costs almost nothing.
9. Decide what you are handing over
Plenty of this is a weekend with a stud finder. Hooks, shelving and paint are genuinely DIY. Two parts are worth handing over: overhead racks, because the failure mode is a loaded rack coming out of the ceiling, and the floor, because grinding, moisture testing and coating are equipment and timing rather than effort.
That split is exactly how the Kirkwood job ran. The owner had spent the winter doing his own drywall, paint and electrical, and handed over the floor alone. We found a 550 square foot slab ready to coat, put down a Tidal Wave polyaspartic flake system, and were off site in two days.
You do not need all nine of these. If the car is the whole point, the floor and the lighting do most of the work and the rest can wait a year. And a coating will not fix a slab that is damp underneath: if moisture is coming up through the concrete, that gets tested and dealt with before anything is applied, or it lifts later.
Three we finished
Three real car guy garages in the metro, with what went in and how long we were on site.
| Where | Size | What went in | On site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fenton | 700 sq ft | Epoxy floor, custom cabinets, slatwall, overhead storage | 4 days |
| Ladue | Full interior | Walls repaired and painted, then floor, slatwall and shelving | 5 days |
| Kirkwood | 550 sq ft | Tidal Wave polyaspartic flake system | 2 days |
“You did a great job on my garage: I love my garage floor. But more importantly, I like the way you do business!”
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I am Brandon Coleman. I joined Garage Designs in 2014 installing epoxy floors, moved into full remodels in 2021 and bought the company in May 2023. The company has been remodeling St. Louis garages since 2002 and is accredited by the Better Business Bureau, or BBB, since 2008. When I quote a car guy garage I measure the bay, check the slab and ask what the car actually needs, and on a 500 square foot bay that conversation usually decides whether the cabinets fit at all.
Call 314-308-7780 or ask for a free in-home estimate. You get the garage measured, an answer on what the slab needs, a layout for the storage and your price before anything starts. Fenton, 772 Merus Ct., Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM.
