Your garage loses a lot of warmth simply via conduction across the surface of your garage door. Over the course of the winter, that can bring your garage’s temperature down close to outdoor temperatures, which is particularly unpleasant if you live in a place that regularly sees -10 or -20 in the winter.

One of your first lines of defense is to insulate your garage door. Pennsylvania’s Jaydor Company has a helpful post that describes what you can do for wood-and-panel doors, flat doors and steel doors.

“Foam board is the most popular option, and it’s sold in rigid panels that can then be cut to size,” Jaydor writes on its blog. “Place them in the recesses between the frames of your garage door. For extra protection, considering installing two layers. Foam board insulation has an R-value of between three and six, so it is worth the money. R-value refers to insulation’s ability to resist heat flow. The higher the R-value, the better a material’s insulating power.”

Insulate your walls, too.

Insulation manufacturer Johns Manville has some of the best insulation installation tutorials around. Their tutorial for installing garage insulation covers both exterior walls and knee walls.

Upgrade your weather stripping.

Most people tend to go with the cheapest option when weather stripping, and in many cases the cheap option works fine. Fine Homebuilding Magazine’s Gary E. Carson, however, reports that basic weather stripping isn’t enough for his garage in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

“Door-bottom edge stripping is usually shaped like a flattened-out U with one long leg and one short leg,” he writes. “As the drawing illustrates [pictured in the linked post], I install the stripping on the top and side jambs with the long leg lightly pressing on the door. I hold the strips in place with plywood battens 1/4 in. thick by 1-1/4 in. wide. Once the battens are screwed in place, I use a razor knife to trim the short legs flush with the battens.”

You can also just install a weather seal.

England’s Ultimate Handyman has a very nice video tutorial on how to install a seal at the threshold where your garage door meets the ground. This is a great way to not only keep out the cold, but all rain, insects and anything else that could find its way under your garage door.

Waterproof the garage floor if you have not already done so.

John Pozadzides from GeekBeat.tv posted on his personal blog a few years ago about his own experience coating his garage floor with epoxy (it was easy, he reported) and recommended that everyone else do the same.

We agree. Wants the snow starts to fall, anything vehicle you pull into your garage is going to track in caked-up mud, salt and slush. Deal with that now, before it becomes a problem.

You might not want to fill in your floor’s contraction joints.

The contraction joints in your garage floor will move about, especially in the first years after your garage is built, as the earth below settles. Some homeowners want to fill those in after a while, and that’s fine under certain circumstances.

All Garage Floors explains why:

“Filling the joint is not an issue if you are covering your garage floor with vinyl composite tile and isn’t even necessary for garage mats or interlocking tiles. However, if you plan on painting your garage floor or doing an epoxy coated floor, you can potentially create some cosmetic problems with that seamless looking floor later down the road.”

Prep your gas-powered tools for winter.

This includes your lawn mower, your Weed Eater, and anything else with an internal combustion engine. Once you park them for the winter, clean them, drain the oil, replace any parts, and let them run until they use up all the gas in their tanks.

Jacks Small Engines, an online supplier of parts for outdoor power equipment, has the most thorough tutorial we have found on winterizing your machinery.

Get organized.

Here is a tip we cannot stress enough. The same way you put away your shorts and beach gear for the winter, you should put away your spring and summer stuff for the season. Then, pull all of the things you will likely need for winter (a shovel, a snowblower, a salt bucket) forward for easy access.

We put together a post of our own recently that we hope will provide the inspiration needed to get your garage organized. The difference is so stark: Your garage goes from a place you try to avoid to a year-round functional, usable space.

Winterizing Around the Exterior of Your Home