There is no place to park your car and your garage is looking more like a family closet? Numerous piles of rubbish block your doorway? If you are reading this then you probably have answered with “yes” to both questions.
You can easily transform your garage into usable space, create a tiny office or use it to park your vehicle.
To achieve it, you’ll need to:
Make a quick plan for your garage
Sort the items inside the garage into different piles, divided by type/category
Define your zone for garage storage
Aim for the wall not the floor
Create a place for everything. This may be a little bit stressful, but doing it now, it will be easier for you in future.
Following these steps to organize your garage will bring back your car to its long forgotten home. And who knows… you can find many of the things you’ve been wrongly accused to have lost some time ago.
1. Make a plan for your garage space
The garage is a quite valuable part of your real estate. In some cases it represents 1/5 of your home storage space and it is important for you to know what you will do with all that space when you organize it.
Having a vision of your garage’s future look and how you are going to use it leads to two other things:
It is a source of motivation to clean the rubbish in your garage
Spending time on cleaning and organizing will make you value the reclaimed space
If you are into mechanical work on cars and bikes, set up your garage to those types of things. Woodworkers, for example may transform their garage in a different way.
2. Sort your things into different piles
Organizing your garage can be overwhelming. The first thing is to break down your organizing process into small chunks. This strategy is a perfect way to get started. Simply choose a corner of the garage, or a shelf. Start small but think big and follow these steps:
Throw away the things that you no longer use
Label one of the boxes “garbage”, another “to use” and the other “donations”. Now go through your garage and decide the items that go in each of the boxes. For example, empty paint cans may be put into the garbage. Yet, if you have unused toys or old bikes you can donate them or make some money selling them on a garage sale.
3. Define your zones for garage storage
Once you’ve sorted your things you need to define different zones in your garage for each category. These zones can be:
household items
tools
sports related items
Consider the following two strategies when organizing your garage’s zones. Place tools with tools – or sports related items with sports related items, this way you are more likely to find the items when the time comes. What are the spaces easy to reach – define those spaces with easy access and place items that you use often. Items which you don’t use quite often can be stored in harder to reach areas.
4. Aim for the wall not the floor
To save your garage floor from future’s problems it is useful to aim for the wall and use your garage space more effectively. You can achieve that by hanging bikes on hooks and putting other items on the shelves. Hooks and cabinets are fantastic options for utilizing the space.
5. Don’t let the hard work go to waste
This is guide on how to organize garage space, but it applies to any other part of the house. Remember, defining zones makes it easier to find and put away items. The trick to maintaining your garage properly is to ensure you put back items in their spots. There should be a place for everything and everything should be in its place.
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