Thanks - lots of useful ideas! Lemme post a back story of this little Amsterdam garage/workshop.
Day one - back in August. True to tradition, after receiving the keys to a new place, I started on the garage.
SWMBO approved, on the premise it would be a nice dust-free place to stash not-yet-unpacked stuff when moving in.
Also I need a basis to do the work on the rest of the house from, right? Thought so.
The first to go was the little wall in the back. Here's part of it still standing, with part of the door frame leading to the little room behind it - the former laundry room.
Who makes the laundry room two floors down from the bedroom? So step one was booting the washing machine upstairs and knocking down that wall to extend the garage :-)
Then the same day I got the key, after rushing to get the wall and bottom row of insulation panels out, the flooring guy came to prime... sand...
... and paint...
Notice the walls and ceiling are padded in thick insulation, except where the shelves are. This is because the house was built in 2006 under strict energy/insulation code. The builders apparently didn't want to invest in an insulated garage door. So instead, they slapped the cheapest wood shavings / styrofoam sandwich panel insulation they could find, all over the walls and ceiling. That placed the whole garage outside the house's insulated shell. But not only is that stuff butt ugly, I obviously wanted a warm workspace. And a bigger one. Because if you have nearly half foot of insulation all around a 9 foot wide garage - it turns into a 10 foot wide garage with that stuff removed.
By now I've taken that down from all the walls and part of the ceiling, and am liking the difference.
So I set out to insulate the garage door instead - a simple single-layer metal tilt-up jobbie, heavily distorted by wide angle lens here:
Ok - all that's done now.
Here's what I have so far, same corner without the fisheye, behind a slightly dusty sohc/4:
You only get to see a small corner because the rest is a mess, having cleared all the shelves that were on this wall
Color is RAL7031 blue/gray, extended onto a sorta smudge-proof band along the wall, conveniently ending just above half tire-height.
The rest of the wall I painted bright white, to spread the light...
The long wall and back wall are solid concrete, all others are crumbly gypsum blocks.
I'm putting the shelf rails back on but higher up, the bottom shelf at about workbench height. The idea is the front wheel of a motorbike fits underneath for space-saving parking, as do engine blocks and other large objects.
Maybe add some shelving above the workbench in the former laundry corner, to make maximum use of that strong concrete wall for storage.
On the crumbly-walled side, I'm probably making a french cleat style tool wall,
a bit like THISI guess for lighting, the floor could have been a few shades lighter, but that's too late now - the floor was a bit of a last-minute decision anywaty, to get it done before it would get really difficult to clear the floor again.
What I could do instead is add some lights under the bottom shelf. Being at workbench height, only half of the wall below it is grey, the top half is still white, lending itself for spreading light towards the side of a project being worked on.
I also like Spotty's (what's in a name?) spotlight idea! will have a think how that could fit in. I guess maybe one of those desk lamps with a long sprung/hinged arm could be wall or shelf mounted for this purpose.
