Is clutter slowly creeping into your life and taking up your garage space with overflowing items ready to bust out? Most of the time, we don’t find the time nor the energy to declutter our spaces. For most people, the best place to keep items and forget about them is usually the garage. However, over time the stored items become overwhelming. Where and how do you begin to declutter and organize your garage for more space? Consider these six guidelines below:
1. Get Your Friends to Help
What better way to get help than by involving your friends in your garage organizing project? Gather your friends over for a garage cleaning get-together. Make the atmosphere more relaxing by playing music and serving food and drinks. Trade labor, your friends help you clean your garage in exchange for someday having your help to clean and organize theirs.
2. Plan Ahead
Will you need shelving, storage cabinets, bins, and packing boxes? If so, purchase these items before starting on organizing your garage. Having storage shelving, cabinets, and other storage items on hand will minimize the time and energy you require to run to a local store to purchase what you need.
Plan on the number of days you require to clean and organize your garage. Planning for a day or two within the same weekend will ensure you don’t procrastinate and finish organizing your garage.
3. Organize your items per category
As you remove all items from your garage, pile them according to their use. Are they power tools and electricals? Pile these together. Are they bedroom, living room, or kitchen items? Give them their pile. And so on. Next, break them down further into different categories: Keep, sell, donate, trash.
A suggestion, to avoid keeping items you might never use, ask yourself. Will I ever use this item in the next 3 to 6 months or 1-year at the maximum? Remember, you want to declutter and organize your garage, not to clutter it again.
4. Think Vertical Storage
Once your garage is empty, take a paper and draw out a simple layout of where you would like to store the different ‘Keep’ items. Tall storage shelving or cabinets take up less garage space and store more items. A long closet with sliding doors saves on space than a cabinet with swinging doors. A pegboard over a work table or even in the closet for handy tools is more practical than piling them in a box. Hanging garden tools onto wall pegs is better than placing them on the floor.
5. Organize small items
Bits and pieces such as nails, screws, sandpaper, power cords, and other small bits can be difficult to organize. Consider using labeled jars or containers to store these different items.
6. Hang up large items
Items such as ladders, wheelbarrows, mowers, and other large objects take up much-needed space. Consider hanging them on the wall, if possible, to save on your garage space.
Do you need to build your storage shelves or cabinets? Give us a call today or stop-in at Nuzum Building Supply for Free Quotes and Estimates.