It’s not a fun task, but organising your garage is a must if you want to be able to locate anything quickly and easily. We all know the feeling of ultimate frustration when we have to turn our garage upside down looking for that elusive 13mm spanner!
So next time you’re passing, don’t just stick your head round the door and decide that the hours you’ll have to burn tidying up aren’t worth it, with a few easy steps it’s makes the whole process that much less painful. Remember too that the pay off here is ending up with a useful storage space that you can use to your advantage, rather than just a dumping ground. Of course it’s important to keep up your discipline with keeping it tidy, or else it will soon turn into the same old jumble sale that it was before.
Some top tips for getting started:
- Get the rest of the house clean and tidy first. Have a long hard look at any items that get labelled ‘for the garage’, do they really need to go in the garage, or is there a more suitable location for them elsewhere in the house? Come to think of it, do you need to keep them at all?
- Having decided on a home for everything, it’s a good idea to begin organising things by category. The best thing to use for storage are cardboard boxes as these are available for free from supermarkets. Don’t forget to label your boxes with whichever category of item is in them
- Many hands make light work! Getting the whole family involved not only gets the job done quicker, but also makes it a less tedious affair. It also means it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone when they can’t find their favourite moth eaten teddy bear any more!
- Ensure that you give yourselves enough time to really get your teeth into this task, ideally an entire weekend. This way you stand a much better chance of getting it all done in one go, and save yourself from tripping over boxes of things in mid transit for weeks on end
- Make sure you’ve all the plastic bags, sticky labels, and cardboard boxes you need before you get started.
- As you sort through categorising the things you wish to keep remember to consign the things you don’t want to a ‘carboot/garage sale’ pile, or straight to the bin for the things that are broken/otherwise unusable
- When looking to reorganise the newly consolidated items, try to think ahead to ahead to how frequently you will use them, placing the most frequently used items in the most convenient, easy to reach positions
- Install shelving, hooks, and other items to provide a neater and more organised storing solution that doesn’t result in everything cluttering up the floor…again!
Once you’re happy with the layout, and the items you have kept and stored, you can begin thinking about what new tools and other items you might need for current and future projects. After all, with the garage tidy it should free you up tobegin working on some of those long neglected DIY tasks that you’ve been putting off, having not been able to get anywhere near your toolbox!