Perhaps you’re familiar with this routine: one sunny Saturday, you decide it’s time to clean that garage at last. You put a whole day of effort into it, and by sundown, you’re shocked that you have floor and wall space again, everything has a place, and it looks presentable even to your relatives again. Unfortunately, this honeymoon phase doesn’t last long before clutter creeps back into your life. You suddenly realize that the garage is a mess again just a few weeks later.
To get out of this “one step forward, two steps back” routine, you need to stop clutter from forming. This means everything needs to have a place that everyone in your household knows about. Organizing your garage properly isn’t just getting rid of the mess – it means making sure you won’t fall into bad habits again. Here’s how you can organize your garage for good!
Figure out what your end goal is.
Different people have different priorities for their garage. Some people want a space where they can easily work on home improvement projects, while others need space to overwinter their plants. Some just want a space where it’s easy and roomy to park a car, and others need to store sports equipment in such a way that it’s easy to access everything. You don’t have to choose just one priority, either; when you’re organizing this way, you can have it all as long as you know what your end goals are.
Clear everything out of the garage and put like things together.
Pull everything you have stored in your garage out and clean the garage itself with your mop, broom, and so on. If you want to paint or refinish any work surfaces or the floor, now is the time to do so. Then, turn your attention to the stuff you’ve pulled out and sort it all out. Put camping gear together, holiday decorations together, sports gear together, and so on. The more organized your stuff is, the easier the next few steps will be.
Purge everything you really don’t need.
Take a look at your groups of things and see if you have any duplicates, stuff you don’t use anymore, and so on. You can probably pick out a few things immediately, but keep working to get rid of about half of your stuff. This may seem overwhelming, but the practice of prioritizing what you would keep versus what you would ditch can let you know what you really need.
Map out and label your zones.
Finally, you can start mapping out your zones of storage space, expanding them with shelving, hooks, and bins, and labeling the zones. Use a label maker like the dymo 450 to bring order to your space by identifying what goes where. For example, label where the sports equipment should be stored and what belongs in each drawer of your tool workstation.
If you take a longer-term approach to organizing your garage by figuring out where each thing should go, you will greatly improve the chances of your garage staying organized weeks and months later. Don’t be afraid to use labels and bins to create storage zones so that you always know where something should go, and when you’re using your garage every day, take the extra few seconds to put things back where they belong.