Organize your garage in a weekend
What’s in your garage? Do you have garden tools, lawn care equipment, sports equipment, boxes of who knows what that won’t fit in your house? Does your car have to stay in the driveway because it won’t fit in the garage? If the answer to any of these questions is a resounding YES, then maybe it’s time to get your garage organized. The garage can become a mixed bag for things that haven’t been assigned a home or that you intend to put away later, then you take care of something else and forget about it. Many people use the garage for storage and never intended to use it to house their vehicles. That’s fine if you’re short on space and need more storage, but if you’re not organized, you end up buying duplicates because you can’t find something, or you just spend a lot of time trying to find the item you’re looking for. .
The plan
The first thing to do is a little planning. A garage can typically take a weekend to clean and organize, depending on how big it is, how much stuff you have, and how many team members will be involved. Your team can be your family or friends. It involves the whole family. I bet everyone in your family has some of their stuff in there. If you’re single, ask a few friends to help you out and give back by helping them with your garage or basement organization project. Schedule an upcoming weekend that is open on your calendar and the calendar of your team members. You may want to choose another date as a backup weekend in case it rains. Schedule it to start in the morning to allow enough time throughout the day to finish the steps you planned for the day. You can use the first day to sort and purge, then the next day to allocate homes and bins. Be sure to schedule breaks and lunch for both days. Inform all team members of the plan when you create the schedule, and review it before you begin.
Day 1 – Spell and Purge
Remove everything from the garage and group similar items together. Use areas of the driveway, patio, or lawn for the categories. You can make a game out of this step to make it fun for the kids. For example, see how many toys they can find in 15 minutes. Or how many items of sports equipment they can find in 10 minutes. One of the categories may be items belonging to the house that never made it out of the garage. When all the elements are sorted, the next step is to purge. Discard any broken items or things you no longer need, use, or like. Consider recycling or donating before sending anything to a landfill. The goal is to reduce the number of ‘keepers’ so that they are proportional to the amount of storage space available. For items that belong in the house, bring them inside and put them in their assigned spaces. At the end of the day, you’ll need to move the guardians to the garage in their categories so they stay safe overnight.
Day 2 – Assign houses and containers
Take a look at your empty garage and the storage you have available. Storage comes in all shapes and sizes. Shelving, containers such as plastic bins, empty trash cans, planters or baskets, freestanding racks, built-in shelves, and pegboards are all great for garage storage. Use what you have on hand first, in the garage, and then inside your house. Purchase additional storage only after you have exhausted all available possibilities at home. Be sure to measure the bins and gaps to ensure the storage item will fit in the gap. Create zones for each activity and their respective items. These zones are most likely the categories you determined when you were grading on Day 1. Some typical zones include lawn and garden tools and equipment, sports equipment, car care and tools, plant food, and insecticides. Assign houses and organize them into containers based on their zones. As you organize your things into their zones, keep the following tips in mind.
- Make sure you have enough clearance to open car doors when storing items against garage walls.
- Use large plastic trash cans to store garden hoses.
- Use a pegboard to hang small hand tools in the garage or shed. Draw an outline around each tool so there is no mistake where to put it back.
- Store fuels on the floor of a shed or on the ground in a covered area away from the house.
- Store toxic chemicals on a shelf at eye level with the labels facing forward, to mitigate the risk of spillage by reaching too high a shelf.
- Store garden tools in a bucket with sand mixed with a little motor oil to keep them clean.
- Store lighter items and infrequently used items on higher shelves.
- If storage is limited, think vertical. Bike racks and ladders that mount to the garage wall save a lot of space.
You should do that. Don’t you feel better now? You can fit the vehicles in the garage and find the things you need when you need them. And it only took a weekend to make!
