Tips for Organizing Your Garage

Everyone likely has at least one spot in their house that they consider to be a constant disaster area they have to deal with. 

It could be the junk drawer in your kitchen that gets opened once a year to find the birthday candles, the closet you can’t bring yourself to look at when you grab your outfit in the mornings, or it could even be an extra room that no one uses for anything else. Eventually, all of these places get cleaned for one reason or another. The one junk spot that is rarely, if ever touched is the garage.

You may have long since ditched the dream of parking your vehicle safely within because you know you’ll never give it the deep clean it deserves. Well, that changes today. 

Whether the idea came to you in a dream or while you were following the essential steps for painting metal garage doors, the following tips will help you turn the disaster zone back into the pristine room you saw during the open-house tour.

Clear the Space

The first step to organizing any room, let alone the garage is to completely clear the space. Everything inside must be put elsewhere. This allows you to clean shelves and tools, reminds you of lost items you’d forgotten about and forces you to really consider each item. 

Think about it: you’ve kept the garage a disaster for years because you didn’t want to take the time and effort to move it out. Once it is out, you have to consider if the effort of putting it back in is worth it. Some things you know you’ll put right back but any that you’re unsure of can be examined in the next step.

Sort Through Your Stuff

If moving everything out of the garage was the most physically demanding part of this process then decluttering is the most mentally demanding part. It must be done though because it’s the only way your garage will ever improve. 

As you look through your stuff, question each item with three words: want, need, and use. If you use an item all the time then you need to keep it. Start a keep pile.While organizing your garage, don’t forget about the door itself. For expert repairs and maintenance, trust Chip’s Garage Door Repair to keep it running smoothly and securely.

If you don’t use it yet but you know it will be necessary for a future project, add it to the keep pile. 

If the item fits neither of these criteria but you want to keep it for tangible reasons like sentimentality then it once again hits the keep pile. If an item fails to pass these three checks, decide whether to sell, donate or toss it and start a pile dedicated to that purpose. Every single item must go through this process before hitting a pile; otherwise you’ll just end up back where you began.

Give Everything a Place

An empty room is the best canvas for an interior designer which is good because you’ll have to temporarily embody one to give every item a place. Once you’ve decided on what is kept and what’s discarded, separate it into themed piles. Tools go in one pile, camping gear in another, and this continues until every item is categorized and you know what kinds of stuff needs to be stored together. 

For example, let’s assume that you have a large standing toolbox. Because of its weight and contents, it needs to be up against the wall. You decide to dedicate one of the corners of the garage not just to the toolbox but to tools in general. While it may be a bit tedious to set up, you’ll appreciate it the next time the sink springs a leak or that one picture falls off of the wall again.

Add Storage Spaces as Needed

You’ll likely realize that you need more storage to properly store everything. From here, you’ll need to consider your best two storage options: cabinets and open shelves. 

The garage is connected directly to the outdoors with a large door, which means dust, debris, bugs and more can get inside. For many things, this isn’t a problem—however, keep this in mind if you’re storing sensitive items then you may want to keep them in cabinets.

Other items may be collections of bins, jars, or another type of container. These items work well on open shelves because they not only allow you to quickly see what each container holds but also provide easy access to those containers. 

Tools may not work well in either storage type and are best suited to either being stored in a somewhat organized toolbox or hung on the wall via a pegboard. You can also hang some items like bikes from the walls to keep the floor clear. 

Living a Less Cluttered Life

At the end of the day, you need your garage space to feel less cluttered and to work for you, so do whatever you need to make that happen. 

Taking the time out to properly declutter and organize this area can give you some much needed peace of mind, as well as allow you to reclaim what would be otherwise lost space inside your place.