Blog

  • Finding Treasure: Fisher Research Labs

    Who hasn’t fantasized about discovering a buried stash of old valuables, or uncovering a pirate’s treasure from the beach? Children and adults alike love to rediscover the past, and one of the most fun and potentially lucrative ways to do that comes with treasure hunting. Hobbyists and professionals who search through ruins, farmsteads and beaches for relics from another time capture the imagination of us all, and hearing about someone finding a lost wedding ring or handful of colonial-era coins makes you wish that you’d been the one searching your backyard! This desire is exactly the reason that led Dr. Gerhard Fisher to patent the metal detector and found Fisher Research Labs, an ongoing world leader in metal detectors. Fisher founded his company in 1931 in Palo Alto, California, inside the garage attached to his home.

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    Death by DIY: Electricity!

    Have you ever tried to do a home improvement job yourself to save some cash? Of course you have! Most homeowners have a little D-I-Y spirit in them and tackling a problem yourself can be convenient and quick. With the rise of Youtube’s How To videos and Pintrest’s step-by-step guides, you can usually find some help for whatever needs doing just by looking around online. There are a couple of areas, however, that no homeowner should try to DIY.

  • How to Upgrade your Garage Door: Painting it!

    Is your garage door a white rectangle? Most doors are, and although there’s nothing wrong with a simple solution, some homes simply don’t look as good with a white door. Maybe your home’s exterior is better suited for a wooden door, or a door colored in a less traditional tone. Some homes can match the styling of their door’s glass windows to the styling of their entry door or nearby exterior windows. Some homeowners choose to make their door pop by painting it red, blue, green, or painting it with a bold pattern. Even just changing the hardware on your door’s exterior to emulate a carriage house door. Basically, if you’ve got an older door or a plain door, you might be missing out on one of the best ways to express your personality on the outside of your house!

  • The HP Garage

    The Hewlett-Packard Company, usually called HP, is one of the largest information technology companies in the world. They produce a variety of hardware components and software that are used all around the world. HP employs over 300,000 employees and earned more than 110 billion dollars of revenue in 2014. Needless to say, HP is a big deal in the world of electronics, but the company has one high honor that has nothing to do with their commercial success; the garage in which HP first operated has been named “the birthplace of Silicone Valley” and added it to the list of California Historical Landmarks. Hewlett-Packard started in a garage, and for over seventy-five years since then they have been one of the preeminent names in information technology.

  • 25 Ways to Childproof your Garage

    You might think of your garage as a messy storage room, but anyone who has ever had a child knows that kids see something very different. To a child, a garage is an enchanting land of forbidden toys, tasty liquids and fun machinery. Keeping kids out of the garage is the best way to protect them from it, but once your child gets to the age that they can open doors, you can’t be expected to watch them 24/7. We’ve collected 25 tips to child-proof your garage. Spending a couple hours making your garage a safer place for your son or daughter to play is well worth the time when you consider the risk of a child getting hurt, and most of these tips can be done on a small budget or no budget at all.

  • Dinosaur Door

    The garage door is typically thought of as one of the noisiest parts of your home, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Although many garage doors are poorly maintained and therefore end up being rather loud, if noise is a concern then there are a number of simple steps you can take to reduce the amount of noise that operating your door makes. Some of these steps might place you at risk, so we recommend only having an expert perform this maintenance, but some of the simpler steps can be safely performed by homeowners. If your garage door sounds like a dinosaur, like in the video attached, frankly that is awesome and we don’t suggest changing it. But if your door is a boring sort of loud, these simple steps can help reduce the noise and keep you sane.

  • Primed for Success

    Amazon.com is the largest Internet-based retail company in the United States, and the 6th-most-visited website in the world, but it hasn’t gotten to that lofty position without some growing pains. Amazon in one of the newest companies we’ll be covering in Garage Greatness, since they made their first sale in 1995, a mere twenty years ago. In those twenty years, Jeff Bezos, the manically-driven mastermind behind Amazon’s record-shattering success, has moved his business from a garage-based bookseller to a household name and competitor in nearly every industry and country around the globe. At the beginning, however, it began in a garage.

  • Your Garage’s Curb Appeal

    Whenever you consider making a large change to your home, it is a good idea to keep resale value in mind. Unless you plan on owning your home for the rest of your life, you will need to put it back on the market at some point. If you make undesirable changes to your home in order to make it more appropriate for your living situation, you might find yourself regretting the choice when your house languishes, unsold, for months. Many homeowners wonder if converting their garage to a living space would give them a leg up against the competition, and others don’t know if they can expect to recoup the cost of a new garage door when they sell. We’ve done the research and can pass our findings on to you, so that you can be an informed consumer.

  • Garage Door Origins

    The origins of the garage door are difficult to trace. If you consider early chariot gatehouses to be garages, then the earliest doors date to around 450 BC. These early doors were used to shelter chariots when they weren’t being used in sport or war, and functioned very similarly to barn doors. Romans used their chariots for carrying archers around the battlefield and to transport their leaders, and perhaps more often for sports like hunting and racing. The invention of the spoked wheel made chariots possible as early as 2000 BC, and chariot races were still popular through the 6th century.

  • 8 Hilarious Garage Door Fails

    Everyone has had some experience with a garage door failure, but hopefully you haven’t failed as badly as these homeowners. Scroll through our list to see some truly world-class failures from around the web and contact us to share are failure stories of your own! We don’t advocate doing anything you see in the pictures below, unless of course you want to end up in our next fail list!

  • The Google Garage

    Google is the most omnipresent and omnipotent power that people interact with on a daily basis, which has given some geeks the idea to argue that Googlism – that is, worship of Google as God – is the closest that humans will ever come to interacting with something omnipotent. The farcical religion is more joke than theology, but the believers of Googlism are right about Google’s power over every part of our lives. Google is the most-visited website in the world and handles over half of all internet searches, but Google Inc is also involved in Email, cloud storage, an office software suite, and a host of cutting-edge technologies like self-driving cars and augmented reality headsets. The company is a very big deal, and vying with Apple (another garage startup!) for the coveted position of most valuable brand.