Organize Your Garage

Believe it or not, you can easily and rather quickly organize your garage. If the only thing you use your garage for is storing your car and whatever mess you have accumulated over the years, you are wasting one of the largest open spaces in your home. Taking a little bit of time to organize the items in your garage allows you to maximize the use of that space, which makes sense, since you are already paying for it.

Sort Everything

Sorting items is the first and one of the most important steps in organizing your garage. It’s also very easy to do. Simply take all of the items in your garage and group them together. All this takes is a little bit of logic and labor. For example, if you have a hoe, shovel, pick and other digging materials, those would logically be grouped together. The same is true of all of your automotive repair tools, all of your outdoor recreational items and so forth.

Storage Matters

Storage options are varied and, in many cases, very affordable. You can find solutions for storing items on your walls, on the ceiling and in the bins and crates at just about any home improvement store.

You can take your larger items and suspend them from hooks, which provide a very effective means of storage. You’ll also find that your medium sized items fit very well on shelving. For smaller items, you’ll want to look at bins and crates as storage containers, which can then be put onto the shelving. When you do organize your shelving, items that you use more frequently should be positioned toward the front.

Container Options

If you’re tired of looking at unsightly piles of items, bins and crates are your solution. After you have everything sorted out by use, you can put those groups of items in bins and then label the bins so that you can find exactly what you need when you need it. The trick is to make certain that you position all the labels outward on the shelving, making it easier to read them

Crates are ideal solutions for sports equipment. Balls can be very easily stored, both large and small varieties. It makes it easy to locate them, as well, which can prevent your organizational scheme from getting messed up too quickly. If you have longer sports items, such as bats, hockey sticks and so forth, you can easily find longer bins that can accommodate them. This also protects expensive sports equipment from damage, which can save you money in the long run.

Use Your Walls

Pegboards are great solutions for wall storage, and shelving is likely to be used in just about any garage organization plan. You have to select your shelving based on the items that you’re going to store on it. If you have a lot of bigger items, large, wide shelving is appropriate. For the smallest items, rely on those crates and bins that you picked up for storage.

It’s a good idea to have at least one locking cabinet for dangerous items. This is where you put paint, fuel and other items that you definitely would not want within the reach of children. Power tools can also be stored in here.

Ceiling Stash

Check the path your garage door travels as it opens. The areas where it doesn’t traverse can be used for storage and there are simple and inexpensive solutions for this available at home improvement stores. You can stash a lot of items in your ceiling space and really save more useful space in the process.

Label Well

Much of the success of this endeavor is dependent upon your labeling scheme, so make sure you label everything well. Use permanent markers or printed labels and make sure that they are clear and easy to see. Double‑check that you also position them so that they can be read without moving the item around on the shelf.