Many of us use our garage walls as a blank canvas to proudly plaster old relics, memorabilia and any other items to personalise our cave. However, we tend to keep all that passion restricted to the inside, neglecting the outside and letting it blend in with everybody else’s on the street.
So why not take the opportunity to customise your garage door and give your space a fresh facelift?
There are a number of ways of jazzing up the outside; however styleyourgarage.com, a company based in Cologne, Germany, makes things easier by offering a range of pre-made photo-murals that you can simply apply to your door with Velcro.
The designs range from the tasteful to the downright wacky, so whether you want to transform your door into a serene beach scene to compliment those summer days, or you just want to frighten the daylights out of your neighbours by making them think you’re housing an elephant or a jumbo jet in your garage, it’s a fair bet that you’ll find something to scratch your itch.
We caught up with a couple of local blokes that took the more sensible route with their selection, but haven’t sacrificed any of the all-important wow factor.
Ron Blint, a builder based in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, built a shed in his back garden to house his old Fiat collection as he wanted to “have a good workshop and place for storage, as well as be able to take one car out without having to move the other three.”
However, when he realised that his living area looks straight out onto his garage, he decided to make the view a bit easier on the eye. Now, instead of his dreary garage door, Ron and his family look out onto a frighteningly realistic-looking stable of horses.
“I had planned to just paint the door and decorate it with a load of old hubcaps until a mate of mine suggested I find a print to put on it,” he says.
“I had a look on the Internet and saw some good ideas in a few countries but never found a company that was Australia-based. This was the best website I saw – it had a range of designs and a lot of different sizes.”
He notes that his initial plan was to make his door look like two garages and have a Formula One car on one side and an elephant on the other, but he had to come to a compromise with his wife.
“I decided on a group of pictures and I asked my wife to pick one and she chose the horse design. That might not have been my first preference, but to be honest it was probably the most home-friendly photo. Plus, the way they designed them makes it interchangeable, so we can always pick a new one in the future.”
The design really speaks for itself; the horses look incredibly lifelike from afar, and it doesn’t lose much of its impact even when you get up close.
“I put nightlights on the front of the garage, so when it gets dark the image really pops out. I had to experiment with positioning because from certain directions the light seemed to reflect. When I placed them on the front, pointing away, it worked really well and now the highlights in the photo match the nightlights,” Ron says.
To use the service, firstly you need to measure your door and match it to the closest size on the website. After that, you can decide on your design (there are over 250), enter your credit card details and delivery address and you’re ready to go.
Ron even says that the German company lived up to the country’s reputation for efficiency, fulfilling its promise of a two week delivery.
He notes that a main drawback is that you can only put the decal on a tilt door and not on a sectional or roller door. So if you’re thinking of using the service, check your door type before you commit to a purchase.
After the success of this design and some great feedback from his friends, Ron plans to switch his door to a beach scene for the summer months.
“As long as we don’t put the horse picture out to pasture and we can still use it, I’m sure my wife will be happy,” he says.
Like Ron, Gary Schipper, wanted to mask a mundane garage door and create something more inviting. However, he also saw it as a way to showcase a passion that he and his wife Vikki have been pursuing on the inside of this very garage since 2005: wine making.
The couple yields around 20 dozen bottles of wine a year from their garage winery and they oversee every process from hand picking their own grapes to crushing, de-stemming, fermenting, basket pressing and barrelling.
Gary found that the original door presented an eyesore when viewed from the house and this was a way for the couple to transform their unassuming garage into the full scale winery they had always dreamed of.
“When I finished building the extension on the house, I found that when you looked out of the window, you just saw a dingy, old, plywood garage door.
“Everybody who comes around loves it. It’s a great topic of discussion because you don’t see this kind of thing every day,” Gary says.
“It’s also not far off the correct scale and it’s almost lifelike – we’ve taken pictures of us in front of it with a glass of wine and sent it to friends, and people think we’re actually at a cellar door!”
Gary says that even if the garage was at the front, it wouldn’t stop them giving it a makeover and Vikki agrees that if they ever move, they wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.
“Even if we have three garage doors, we’ll put one on each,” she says.
“Yeah, and this time we’d definitely get the jumbo jet or the fire truck!” Gary adds.
Customising your garage door can be a great way of giving your space the personal touch that it needs, telling people that this is ‘your space’, or it could just be a way of making you and the mates laugh. Whatever your intentions are, you can be sure that this is one way of setting your garage apart from everybody else on the street.
