Transforming our rundown tack room into a multi-purpose ‘luxury’ dirt bike gear storage room

One thing I love is organization. Every time Netflix comes out with a new organization show, I eat it up so fast. For the past two years, my husband and I have used one of our daily drivers and our locker room for all of our dirt bike gear because we didn’t have space in our bus. It would drive me crazy having all of our boots, clothes, accessories jumbled altogether in our hatch, but we didn’t have another option.

When we first purchased our farm, one thing I was super excited about was our new (to us) barn. The barn definitely needed some serious TLC, but I could see the potential. The barn included a decent size, insulated tack room, which is where my wheels started turning.

Although we don’t have any farm animals yet, we do have plans for them in the future. I wanted to keep the tack room for its purpose, but also had the idea to store our dirt bike gear in there too.

The tack room was in pretty poor shape and smelled eye-watering bad of mothballs, chemicals (most likely rodent killer), rodent pee and droppings, and a slew of other barn smells. The previous owner left quite a bit of stuff in there as well.

And so it was time to get down and dirty!

The first step was to empty the room. I started by throwing away any garbage, expired medications and cleaners, and so on. The floor consisted of a few scrap pieces of linoleum and rugs that had seen better days that I threw out. After filling up four contractor bags, removing a couple of drawer units (that we gifted away on Facebook), the room was empty.

The next step was sweeping and vacuuming. The place was coated in dirt and spider webs which required a full floor, wall, and ceiling sweep and vacuum.

The room was now empty of all items, garbage, dirt, spider webs, and grime, and it was time to paint. I ended up painting the floor, walls, and ceiling with Kilz because the odor was still over-powering even after emptying the room (If you don’t know, Kilz is an odor killing paint). I ended up spray painting all of the shelves that were mounted to the walls a matte black to make everything more uniform. Once the paint was dry, I sealed up all of the holes that rodents had created over time so they could no longer get in.

Once all the prep work was complete, my husband and I took a trip to town to pick up a few items. We ended up finding an industrial shelf from Costco which could be split in two, eight large hooks with rubber caps from Home Depot, a variety of plastic bins, a wooden rod, and 4 metal shelf brackets.

We decided to split the room down the middle, the left being for dirt biking gear, and the right for animal supplies. We assembled the shelves, placing one on the dirt bike side and one on the animal side.

I took the 8 large hooks and mounted them to the wall to hold all of our helmets, then mounted the shelf brackets to the wall which held the wooden rod to hang our gear on underneath.

Now for the fun part…organizing! I took every single piece of gear we owned and put it in a gigantic pile in the middle of the room, Marie Kondo style. I went through every piece, sorting them by his/hers and type. All hangable items (shirts, pants, jackets, backpacks, chest protectors) I hung on the clothing rack. All small accessories (gloves, goggles, knee pads, etc.) I placed in two bins (one for me and one for Josh). Our boot dryers fit perfectly on our new shelf, where they could always be plugged in and ready to go.  

We threw down a few extra rugs on the floor for comfort and our old storage ottoman we used in our bus as a small sitting area. I hung up a few of our signs (we love signs) and a cute Pepsi key hook to make it homier. To top everything off, we plugged in an oil heater.

On the other side of the room, I was able to reorganize what we salvaged from previous owners’ animal supplies, and all of our current pet supplies for easy access.

It may seem silly, but this room is one of my favorites because it is SO functional. Now, we don’t have to dig around the back of our car searching for a missing glove or have to put on wet smelly boots. It takes only a few minutes to gear up now versus over 30 minutes without everything organized. Also, I don’t think there is anything better than getting back from a long ride and stripping down in a heated room that has a spot for everything.