How to Organize Your Garage
Are you wondering how to organize your garage? Or where you should even begin? Boulder Garage Door in Colorado has a few tips to help you get started! Now that the weather is warmer, you may be feeling motivated to attack this chore that you kept putting off during the winter months. Believe us, now is the perfect time to get started and once it’s all done you will be so happy that you did it!
A messy garage not only makes it difficult to find your holiday decorations or that tool you need to fix the sink, it can also affect your garage door. Piles can spill over and damage your tracks or throw off your sensors. Your worst case scenario is having heavy items fall against your garage door, causing a dent or even breaking a window. For peace of mind and fewer hassles, here are 7 easy steps on how to organize your garage. Let’s take a look.
- Settle on Your Priorities
Not everyone has the same reason for cleaning out their garage. Of course, we all want to be more organized, but every individual’s end goal might be a little different. For example, it may be important to you to have enough space to store your vehicle inside the garage. Or perhaps you want a useful workspace. Or maybe you just need a more efficient and organized system.
You might even find that more than one of these things, or something else entirely is most important to you. Whatever the case, sit down and prioritize your goals. A clear plan will help you stay on task and cause the process to end up how you want it to.
- Start from Scratch
The best way to properly organize a disastrous garage is to start from the beginning. Lay out a few tarps or blankets in an open area and move everything out so you can see what you are doing. You can even use this time to sweep and clean the walls and floors. If you need to do any painting, freshening up, or inspecting your suddenly clanking garage door, this is also an excellent opportunity to get it done.
- Put Similar Items Together
You can incorporate this step into the last one. As you are bringing all your items out of the garage, you can put similar items together rather than just haphazardly piling everything out there. For example, put all your sports or summer equipment in one spot, seasonal items in another, tools in another and so on and so forth.
- PURGE!
This step is difficult but necessary. We all have more stuff, than we need, taking up space in our garages and organizing one’s garage is the perfect time to get rid of anything unnecessary. Designate 4 different areas for items to keep, trash, recycle and donate and be ruthless in your assessment of each item. Set a mental goal of getting rid of at least 50% of your stuff. You might not actually toss that much but setting a high mental goal will help you be more cutthroat in your decision making.
If you are having trouble being as tough as you should be, try asking yourself these questions. Do you love it? Do you use it? Have you used it in the last year? Do you really need it? If you can’t positively answer any of these questions, decide whether it should be thrown away, recycled or donated and say goodbye to it.
- Create an Organizational Plan
Once you’ve thoroughly purged, step back and take a look at your keep pile. Think about logical places to put items and how to categorize them and start mapping out the space. Get creative and remember that you can hang things on the walls or add some shelves. Don’t forget to look up; you might be able to put some plywood sheets across the rafters to get seasonal stuff up out of the way.
A note here, don’t ever buy organizational items until after the purge step. Once you’re done purging, you might find that you don’t need many of the items purchased and you’ll end up wasting money and having more unnecessary items to store somewhere.
- Get Your Supplies Together
Now that you’ve got a plan coming together buy or gather organizational supplies. A few ideas can be to use big trash cans to store long items like rakes, brooms, shovels and even sporting equipment like skis and fishing poles. Put hooks on the walls to hang ropes, extension cords and even bicycles. Be sure to check item weights and support them accordingly to ensure heavy equipment (like a bike) can’t fall and damage your car or garage door.
Clear plastic containers are ideal for smaller items so that you can see into them. A rolling tool rack or cabinet is perfect for when you want to be able to move stuff (like tools and whatnot) while keeping them organized. If they’re placed close to the garage door sensors, make sure you have locking wheels to avoid any issues.
- Put it All Away
Now that you have your supplies ready, you can easily start storing your items in their designated places. To help yourself out a ton, get a label maker and label everything that you can. Even if you don’t have a real label maker, get some masking or duct tape and a permanent marker and start labeling. This step might not be absolutely necessary, but it certainly is a great help when it comes to remembering what you did with everything!
Now you get to sit back and survey all your hard work. If you followed these steps, you should have reached your goals and have a neatly organized garage full of only items that you need. And the best part is that you will be able to find them when you want them.
From all of us here at Boulder Garage Door, we hope that these steps on how to organize your garage have been helpful to you. Having spent a lot of time working on and in garages, we’ve seen it all, and we know that an organized garage keeps piles from damaging your garage door. The good thing is, once you have taken care of this big job if you commit to putting things back in their place, your garage will stay organized and tidy indefinitely and you will be continually thanking yourself.
