One of the most dreaded places to organize in the home is the garage. I know I have one too. It’s just so easy to open the door and toss stuff in that I don’t know what to do with in. But I pay a price. There comes the time when I need to access that stuff and goodness knows it would take an army to find it.

We had to deal with it.

My husband and I pooled our skills on this one and got the garage organized and into tip top shape. With his knack for getting things put up and out of the way very efficiently and my organizing, labeling know how it was painless and very rewarding.

You can do it too.

So take a deep breath and some vitamins and let’s walk you through tackling that garage.  So you can have an organized space with which to store and find things in.

First off don’t try and do it in one day. Who knows how long it took you to create the mess, unless you hire someone to come in and do it for you it is certainly not going to be resolved in an afternoon. Schedule some time each day for a few weeks to go in there and do something.

Now these are the things you should be doing.

1. Remove the clutter, garbage and things you KNOW you no longer need or want.  This is the biggest job. We also had to add in a year of shredding that has been waiting to be dealt with. A few trips to our favorite charity. Some garbage hauls and a few weeks of maxing out the recycle bin and we were ready to store what was left. Our daughter enjoyed this part because she felt like she was discovering lost treasure. Luckily she didn’t bond with any of it and when we told her where her old toys were going she pitched in to help pack them up.

2. Assess what you need to store in your garage. Make a list if necessary. We needed a gardening spot, tools spot, outgrown baby stuff and clothing for future children, a shelf or two for food items and a space miscellany.


3. Asses the space you have to store it in. You will want to measure your floor space and walls to make sure you can fit what you want into your garage. Especially if one of those items is your car! We took a few measurements and picked up some garage shelving from our favorite warehouse store. In the case of getting to items you need to access more often you should store them in places like open shelving. There are many options here. We chose plastic for the gardening (easier to clean), overhead above the door for the baby items, and steel wall shelving for all else.

4. Figure out what will go where based on how often you use or need the item. In our case the tools needed easy access and year round too. I had already purchased a set of those nice red tool cabinets for my husband (who is very into tools) so he spent some great time bonding with his nephew getting those wayward tools organized and put away. The gardening spot, a seasonal area, needed immediate access during the spring and summer so it was best to put that in an easy to get to spot. That was where most of the clutter was coming from because it had been stored behind and beneath things so when I needed it in a hurry I just dumped what was in the way and left it like that. The outgrown baby clothing and children’s items, once they are needed they are pulled out of the garage not to be put back until no longer needed so they could be stored up and away.