Never Store These Seven Things in Your Garage

The primary purpose of a garage is to provide you with somewhere safe to park your car but many of us end up using our garages as long-term storage facilities instead. Everything we cannot find a home for inside our house or would simply rather keep out of sight is relegated to the garage. While there is nothing wrong with using a garage as additional storage space, especially if you have safe outdoor parking on your property, there are some items it is best not to store in this area of your home.

Seven Things You Don’t Want to Store in Your Garage

During our time as garage door installation and garage door repair experts in Loveland, we have seen all sorts of things stored in garages but those in the following list should always be kept elsewhere.

1. Paint – Some paints may be able to cope with the extreme temperature swings that occur in the average residential garage in Colorado but many cannot. If you buy paint for a decorating project and decide to delay it, you should find somewhere with more stable conditions that you can use as a temporary storage area. Most types of paint will react badly to rapid changes in temperature and humidity, which means the garage is one of the last places you want to store it.
2. Firewood – It may seem like a good idea to store winter firewood in the garage but even though it will not harm the wood in any way, you might want to come up with another solution if you don’t want a houseful of unwanted guests. A large pile of wood is the perfect place for many pests to hide out in, including cockroaches and rats. Once they have moved into your garage, they will naturally start to scout for food and water sources in the immediate vicinity. Unfortunately, your house is almost certainly the nearest source for both of these and is where the pests will head for.
3. Wine – If you enjoy a glass of wine every now and then, the garage may seem like a convenient place to keep a small wine rack that is filled with a selection of your favorites. However, wine needs to be stored in a dark, dry environment where the temperature and humidity levels are stable. Ideally, your chosen storage area should also be maintained at a temperature of between 45 degrees and 65 degrees. Exposure to ambient temperatures above 70 degrees can cause wine to spoil and become completely undrinkable. Very high humidity levels can also cause problems, including moldy corks. For all these reasons, the garage is not normally the best place to store wine.
4. Propane Tanks – You may have been storing propane tanks in your garage for many years, with absolutely no problems at all. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that you won’t experience any issues in the future: just one leak from a faulty tank of propane could result in a deadly build-up of explosive gas in your garage. In such a situation, simply starting your vehicle could trigger an explosion that our garage door repair team will find very difficult to fix! No matter how long you may have been using your garage to store propane tanks, we urge you to find a suitable outside storage area and move them as quickly as possible.
5. Canned Food – We spend a lot of time visiting people’s homes in Loveland. On one visit we may be installing a new garage door opener and on the next, we're fixing a stuck garage door. On these visits, we’ve noticed that quite a few homeowners choose to store canned food in their garages, which is not really a very good idea. Canned foods may last for many years in ideal conditions but such conditions are rarely found in residential garages. In hot and humid environments, some cans may begin to swell and deform; they may even explode. In the middle of winter, your canned goods will freeze, only to thaw again when the temperature starts to rise. This freezing and thawing process leads to a more rapid deterioration in the quality and condition of many different types of canned goods.
6. Refrigerators – Installing an extra refrigerator in the garage can seem like the perfect solution when you run out of storage space for fresh food in your kitchen. Unfortunately, it often turns out to be a bad choice as conditions in your garage are not likely to be refrigerator friendly. During the warmer months of the year, a refrigerator in a garage will have to work much harder to maintain the right internal temperature than one in an air-conditioned kitchen. So, unless you are planning to install an insulated door and air-conditioning in your garage, it’s not a good place to put a refrigerator. The extra energy your appliance will need to expend in order to maintain the correct temperature is sure to be reflected in higher utility bills.
7. Important Documents – Any type of paper stored in a garage makes a great nest for pests such as mice and rats. For this reason alone, we don’t recommend storing important documents in your garage for any length of time.

If you have nowhere else to store canned food or paperwork, contact us now to request a quotation for an insulated garage door installation in Loveland. We’d be delighted to help you fix the issues that currently make your garage a poor choice of storage facility.