Pegboard – Why Everyone Needs Pegboard

Pegboards. Who needs them? You do.

If you have a workbench in your garage, you need one. If you own more than a single hand tool, you need one. If you have to look for an item in your toolbox for more than five seconds, you need one, or two or 10.

Pegboards are easy to install, and after you do you’ll want to kick yourself for not having bought one sooner.

Here’s how I made my decision to install a pegboard in our garage.

With spring in the air and sunshine on her shoulders, my daughter pulled her bike out of storage. I don’t know what happens in your shed during the winter, but I can tell you that something freaky happens in ours from the time I retire my lawnmower and bikes for the winter until the first warm day of spring. Besides the dust that gathers naturally, the bike itself had two flat tires, a loose wheel and a rusty chain.

“What the hell?” was my first reaction, but then I went to work performing a much needed, routine bicycle maintenance on Gracie’s bike.

Or at least I tried to.

I needed my wrench to get started. I picked up rolls of duct tape, moved around boxes of nails and cans of paint on my workbench, which is where I keep all of my tools. Or so I thought.

I spent the next 30 minutes looking for my toolbox only to discover it hidden underneath a layer of drop cloths my wife used to cover the flowers from the frost that the weatherman promised but didn’t deliver.

Cool, I thought. With toolbox in hand, I was ready to begin.

I cracked my knuckles and opened the lid of my toolbox. At first glance, my wrench wasn’t there. So I removed the top tray and looked inside the black hole known to me as the “bottom of the toolbox where everything is thrown because I was too impatient to put them back where they belonged.”

You know what I mean. Screwdrivers, electrical tape, loose drill bits, all that and more were found there, alongside my wrench. And what’s that? Looking deeper, I even found an unopened pouch of tuna at the bottom of my overloaded, unorganized, inefficient toolbox.

At long last, I went to work replacing the bicycle inner tubes and tires. I oiled the chain with a staple that every garage must have, WD-40 and I carefully tightened the wheels with my wrench, the one that took me 35 minutes to find.

I pumped up her bike tyres, then I got into my car and drove to the nearest hardware store where I purchased enough pegboard to cover my garage walls.

My new pegboard easily holds my many rolls of duct tape, packing tape, scissors, saw blades, small garden tools, pliers, level, handsaw, screwdrivers, hammers, drill bits, socket sets, tool belt and more.

Go ahead, ask me where my wrench is today, and I will tell you it’s hanging to the right of my workbench, just about eye level, on a hook, on my pegboard.

PS: Don’t forget the pegboard hooks like I did. Without them, the board is just a board with hundreds of holes.

Note to self: Preparing the bike for winter at the first sign of frost will save me time and money come spring. Guaranteed.