Admit it. How long does it take you to find anything when you are looking for it, often during times of duress, in your garage? If the answer is anything longer than just a few minutes, you’ve got a problem. You know that you’ve left your garage organization skills somewhere else and this room doesn’t really reflect the rest of your house, so it’s time to take action.
Why do we treat the room that we store our cars in differently to every other room in the home? We might not be able to walk on a comfortable carpet in here or admire a nice wooden floor, but there’s no excuse.
The first thing we need to do when we’re thinking about garage organization is to sort everything out and get rid of what we don’t want. This room tends to be a magnet for anything and everything and if we can’t be bothered to think about a nice storage place within the home for something, it’s relegated out here.
If you haven’t used something within the last couple of years, what is the point of keeping it? Of course there are some things which we need to keep for a rainy day or for emergencies, but for everything else discard it or donate it to charity.
Purpose made shelving can make things a lot easier when you are rearranging everything. Try and look for ventilated units which make it easier still to prevent the formation of mold and mildew.
Things are far less likely to be damaged or degraded if you keep them on shelving. Many people advocate that you should conform to the 80/20 rule here. Garage organization dictates that 80 percent of items should be up on shelves, while the rest should be either on the floor or on hooks.
No discussion of garage organization would be complete without referring to the floor. This is a particularly hard cleaning challenge, especially when there’s so much junk around. The only things that should be on the floor are your larger or bulky items or your yard machinery.
Look underneath your vehicles and see what kind of fluid tends to fall from the car when you’re not looking. You need an absorbent mat here so that the floor is kept in as good a conditions as possible and you don’t have to worry about the potential for slip and fall accidents, either.
