Last update: 1 year ago
The garage is one of those places in your home that tend to be hard to keep organised. Items that are seldom used tend to end up there, and if you don’t have a basement in your home, the garage often serves its purpose. We have a pretty simple to follow system that will help you get rid of the unneeded items and make everything more easily accessible.
In this article:
Minimise clutter
The first thing you have to do before organising is to minimise the number of things you have to organise. Sorting everything out is essential, especially as we all tend to keep items we don’t need or use.
Start by cleaning the floor of your garage. A simple sweep should do. As you go about the task lookout for chemical stains, nails, cobwebs or anything that might suggest pests have moved into your garage. You’d be surprised how often that happens, especially in very cluttered garages. While you are cleaning the floor throw out everything you immediately know should go in the rubbish.
Now that you are done with that, a good tactic is to gut the place entirely. Drag everything to the driveway, spread it out and start sorting it into three separate piles – Keep, Donate, and Toss. Spreading it out in the open will make it easier to decide.
After you are done, categorise your keep pile by usage – sports goods, tools and utility, garden furniture, etc.
Organise zones
To keep things orderly, everything should have its place instead of just being randomly clumped together. This saves both space and time. These zones generally depend on your needs but considering common items found in every garage, at the very minimum, you should have places for:
- Car supplies
- Tools and household items
- Sport or hobby gear
Of course, there can be more than three if you so choose and if you have space. This is where the piles on your driveway come into play. They are to give you a basic visual idea of how much space each category will take. From there, you have to figure out how much garage space to give each one.
Storage
Once every group has a home, you can start figuring out how to store them there and give each one a perfectly space optimised spot.
Using the walls for vertical storage is something everybody will tell you is essential when organising your garage. After all, nobody likes tripping on or weaving around stuff to get in their care. There are a lot of cheap options for this like:
- Pinboards for tools
- Easily attachable wire shelving
- DIY shelves you can put together from a few planks of wood
- Stackable plastic containers.
In fact, most of the time, DIY storage solutions will work much better than any organisers you can buy on the market. Be utilitarian in your approach. As a start, some shelving and wall hooks will most likely do the trick. Just enough to put your belongings in to place. Then with time, you can further optimise your system now that you have a working foundation.
Maintain organisation
Of course, the most important thing about garage organisation is maintaining said organisation. It’s a good idea to organise it and wash your garage door regularly. How often depends on you alone, whether every month or every week, but maintenance is key. The more often you organise this space, the less time it will take each time.
We also recommend doing a complete reorganisation once or twice a year. This doesn’t mean completely changing everything but instead going through the steps of this article – where necessary or applicable – to ensure your garage is clutter-free and optimised.
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