The Most Important Step In A Garage Renovation Is Lighting

What's the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to building out a comfortable and easy-to-use shop? Ask anyone worth their salt, and they'll tell you that it comes down to lighting, access to power, and clean workspaces. I recently rented a shop for my haphazard collection of needy automobiles and motorcycles, and after cleaning and painting every surface, the next step was installing the proper lighting so I could actually see and admire the work I'd done. 

As a reminder, here's what the lighting situation looked like before:

Bradley Brownell/Jalopnik

Not only was the old lighting dim and sporadic, but it was also mismatched and ugly. For years, I've used a lot of the free-standing construction lights, trouble lights, or portable lighting to put a shine on my projects. I've never really had a nice workspace with proper overhead lighting, so I was determined to rectify that for the space where my long-term car storage is taking place. Once the walls and ceilings got a nice, clean coat of paint, I threw away the old lights and went shopping. Thankfully for me, Summit Racing is not too far away from my house, so I took a trip to Tallmadge, Ohio, and filled the back of my Porsche Cayenne with lights.

Even though these lights were included with the shop, and therefore free, I couldn't see properly with them. There was always the option of converting these old fluorescent tube lights to LED, but for the price of conversion bulbs, I figured that I might as well install all-new, native LED lights, and way more of them. With plugs already wired into the ceiling that could accommodate ten individual lights, with some decent spacing. I ended up deciding on a full set of linkable four-foot LED shop lights.

These Summit-branded lights can be hung from rafters by the included chains, as I did here, or screwed directly to any surface. I definitely considered adding another handful of these lights on the side walls of the shop to really add some retina-frying capacity, but I ultimately decided against it. I will still need plenty of portable lights to see things underneath my cars, but thankfully, I already have some of those. 

From the moment that I plugged in the first ceiling light, I already knew it was going to be a massive improvement over what had been there before. For starters, I could actually see! I genuinely believe that this single 5,000-lumen light fixture offered more illumination than all five of the lights that had been used in this little shop before. 

Over the course of a couple of hours, I hung all ten lights, plugged them in, and used cable ties to move the six-foot cord on each light up out of the way. It wasn't a particularly difficult task, but certainly a time consuming one as it required me to move the ladder around two or three times just to get one light installed, plugged in, and the cord zip tied up. The end result was well worth the effort, however, as my shop is now as bright as the surface of the sun. 

Bradley Brownell/Jalopnik

I can turn off each of these lights with individual pull chains, which is helpful because I also bought a projector for the space. With the front half of the shop playing movies, bingeing "Better Call Saul", or whatever Grand Prix, I can turn those lights off and still keep a couple on at the back of the shop to see what I'm working on. 

I mentioned earlier that one of the most important things in a shop, aside from lighting, is a clean workspace. For years, I've been limited to just the top of my toolbox (a cheap 46" Yukon unit from Harbor Freight) as a workspace, and I'm hardly a guy who cleans up after myself in the shop, so that space becomes difficult to work with after just minutes with my chosen project of the day. While I was at Summit, I also picked up a pair of these folding wall-mounted work tables. So far, I'm pretty impressed with how stout they are, and I like that I can fold them down to the wall to get them out of my way when needed. 

Bradley Brownell/Jalopnik

I haven't had much opportunity to work on anything in the new shop yet, but I did manage to get my Audi A3 e-Tron in for a Quick jack-aided wheel swap. Even for just this simple task, the lighting situation was drastically improved from before and from any other shop I've ever worked in. Hot damn, this is the business! 

I had initially planned to install a big four-post lift, but I'm not sure it will save enough space to justify having it. For this year, at least, I'm going to stick with my Quick Jacks and figure out a lift storage system for my motorcycles to get them up off the ground. Maybe this lack of extra storage space for cars will finally force me to get off my butt and sell a few things. Does anyone want a Neon ACR or a Cadillac Allante? I'm open to trades. 

I still have more to do with this shop. I've started figuring out some storage solutions, as you can see, and I have started working on packing the walls with appropriate decor. If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears.