Garage cabinets with doors

Doors cost money, capacity and accessibility. On the right contents they are worth all three. On the wrong contents they are the most expensive way to store a bin you could have stored on a shelf.

So the useful question is not "should I buy cabinets with doors". It is which specific things in your garage need a door, and the honest list is shorter than most people expect.

What genuinely needs doors

1. Chemicals, fuel and anything a child could reach

This is the strongest case and it is a safety one rather than a tidiness one. Paint, thinners, solvents, fuel, pesticides, adhesives, and — in a garage children use — sharp and powered tools.

If this describes your garage, buy the lockable cabinet and stop reading the cost-per-cubic-foot argument. Steel body, lockable doors, and put it where a child cannot climb to it. Both Seville UltraHD cabinets are steel bodied and lockable.

2. Things fine dust ruins

If you cut, sand or grind in the garage, everything on an open shelf wears a layer of it. Finishing supplies, spare filters, anything with a fine mechanism, and anything you want clean when you pick it up.

3. The category that will never look tidy

Every garage has one — half-used consumables, mismatched packaging, the miscellaneous shelf. Some things do not look tidy on an open shelf no matter how well organized they are. A door is a legitimate answer.

What does not need doors

Nearly everything else, and specifically:

• Anything already in a lidded bin. The bin is the container. Putting a container inside a container is paying twice for the same job — see best garage storage bins.
• Seasonal bulk. Holiday decorations, camping gear, spare bedding. That belongs overhead, not behind a door at eye level.
• Hand tools you use weekly. Two motions instead of one is exactly why tools end up on the bench instead of put away. They want a wall.
• Sports gear and kids' equipment. High turnover, awkward shapes, and it needs to be grabbable. Bins on shelves, or hooks.

What to look for if safety is the reason

If you are buying primarily to lock chemicals or tools away, these are the things to check rather than the capacity figure:

• A steel body, not just steel doors. A lock on a cabinet with a thin back panel is a lock on a box you can get into another way.
• Where it can be anchored. A tall cabinet that can be pulled over is a hazard in its own right, particularly if the reason you bought it is children.
• Whether it sits flat to the wall. A gap you can get fingers into behind a cabinet defeats some of the point.
• Ventilation. A sealed steel box holding solvents in a garage that gets warm is not ideal. Do not seal the doors, and leave a gap behind the cabinet for air movement.

The depth trap, again

It bears repeating here because it bites hardest on cabinets: a standard 27-gallon tote is about 19.6 inches wide, and an 18 inch cabinet cannot close its doors on one.

On open shelving, a bin that overhangs is annoying. On a cabinet it is fatal — the doors do not shut and you have bought an expensive shelf. If bins are going inside, the cabinet needs to be 24 inches deep. The full numbers are on the cabinet roundup.

How many you actually need

Usually one. Make a list of the things on the "genuinely needs doors" list above, in your garage, right now. For most people it fits in a single 36 inch cabinet with room left over.

A wall of cabinets looks like a finished garage in a photograph and costs several times what the same capacity in shelving costs. The layout that actually works is one cabinet against a wall of open storage — worked through on cabinets vs shelves, and planned in detail on how to plan a cabinet wall.