Time to Organize Your Garage
Summer is a great time to organize the garage, when the weather is good and you can spread things out on the driveway. Here’s a real life project we did recently to inspire you to tackle your own!
The Project
Family with 2 young boys, 2 car garage (no need to store a car), lots of sports stuff including bikes, outdoor equipment, music instruments, holiday supplies, gardening equipment, tools, and household utility items. Here’s the BEFORE photo….
Make a Plan
Start with a bit of a vision of where you’re headed (a pro organizer can help you with this part if you’re stuck!). It’s helpful to break the space into major “zones” or categories. A good principle to stick by is high use items live up front and accessible, low-use items live in the back, down low, or up high – less accessible spaces. If you’re lucky, you might have room for a hang out area, a gym, or kid’s art zone.
Sort
The first step is to get down to what you’re actually keeping and understand how much of each category of stuff you have. It takes time, but the easiest way to do this is to pull everything out, sort by category, and edit down each category into your keepers. This process is essential to be able to know how much space each group will take up, how each group will best be stored (container, hook, other?), and to decide what zone the group will live in.
Remember to create “friend groups”. If you have trouble thinking of zones and categories, take a walk through an Ace Hardware. Their displays are a great example of how to group like items together. Walk through the gardening aisle and see how they have created zones for the different types of gardening items, for example.
Purge!
The garage can be a graveyard of stuff that came from the house … do that tough edit to make sure you aren’t just storing empty boxes, broken appliances or furniture that you had intended to repair so your garage can be a functional space for the zones you are creating.
What to do with the rest? This project took two dump runs and the useable stuff was handled in a few donation runs.
Contain & Organize
Once you’re down to the keepers, it’s time to put things back in an organized way so you can see what you have, get to things easily, and most importantly, put them back easily!
At this stage it really makes a difference to have adequate shelving and containers. It’s very hard to store things in a maintainable way if you don’t. You don’t have to buy new! Keep an eye out on resale sites for used shelving or tubs. Where it makes sense, putting things in lidded containers that you can stack and label is ideal. For items that you’re in and out of a lot open bins or hooks (such as a pegboard for active tools) is better.
How long does it take? A lot depends on how quickly you can make the purging decisions and how dense the disorganization is. This project took two 8 hour days of work with 1 organizer and 1 client…before the final shelving was acquired and installed against the wall.
Remember, the whole reason we have STUFF is to facilitate the life we want to be living. Invest a few days in a garage reorganization and reap the benefits for months and years to come!
