How To Make the Most of Your Side Yard

With a smaller home it’s especially important to make use of every single available area – but side yards often turn into inefficient places to put…everything you don’t know where else to put.

Here’s how we transformed a side yard that was basically a garbage storage area into a super-useful space.

First, we added a slanted roof (for rain runoff) and closed up the walls to create a covered area. We then added shingles to the exterior of the roof so that it would match the roof of the rest of the house (and therefore look like an extension of the house from the front), reinforced the exterior gate with locks, and installed an interior gate to separate the part of the space that houses the motorcycle from the part where we keep our bikes and tools.

We also installed hooks to hang our bikes and scooters…

Hung shelving for tools and cleaning supplies…

Put in a couple of outlets for power tools and such…

And found a spot to store our croquet set when we’re not using it (which is always, as we have no idea how to play croquet).

We also painted the interior white with gray accents (Benjamin Moore Raccoon Fur) and power washed the floor. Knowing how much more efficient we made the space makes me wish we’d done it a looooong time ago. (Especially getting those bikes up and off the floor – such a space-saver.)