.Getting Your Garage Organized this Spring

Guest Blogger #410, Entry #1018, March 15, 2012

As temperatures rise, the snow begins to melt, and the songs of birds engaged in courtship fill the morning air, you’ll likely be tempted to open the windows and enjoy the many changes that come with spring. Unfortunately, all the sunshine and fresh air coming in will no doubt serve to highlight the dust and debris that have accumulated during the winter doldrums. This is probably what motivates most people to undertake the infamous “spring cleaning”. But once you have given your house a comprehensive scrubbing and cleared away all the clutter, you may find that your hard work has really only caused an equal and opposite accumulation to build up elsewhere. So before you peel off the rubber gloves and relax on the porch with your lemonade, you’ll need to organize the garage.

Image via: BHG

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Organize your garage

If you’re faced with a mountain of stuff (boxes, bins, and loose items heaped to the rafters) then the best thing you can do is pull everything out. Ideally you should get the whole family (and maybe even a few friends) to pitch in. And before you even start, call your local trash collector to arrange for a bin to be placed outside your house, and consider contacting a donation center to schedule a pick-up for any items you may no longer need that someone else could use (furniture, clothing, electronics, sporting goods, and so on). Then start hauling stuff out and organizing it in the driveway or on the lawn. Sort everything into three piles: trash, donate, and keep. And remember that everything in the “keep” pile has to go back in the garage, so you may want to minimize the amount of stuff that gets placed in this area.

Image via: House and Home

Purge, donate and store

Once you’re finished sorting, toss all the trash into the bin you ordered and box or bag the items that are going for donations. You may also want to create an itemized listing of your donation so that you can use it as a tax write-off (make sure to ask for a receipt when the charitable organization comes for pick-up). Finally, it’s time to give the now-empty garage a thorough cleaning to set the stage before items start going back in.

After you’ve finished rousting bugs and rodents that have settled into the cracks and crevices, sweeping away the cobwebs and dead leaves, and soaking up oil stains on the concrete, you need to think about how to arrange your space for maximum storage and efficiency. After all, a little planning now could help to ensure that your garage doesn’t go back to the cluttered catchall it turned into before. If you want to go all out you could hire a company to install custom cabinetry in your garage, but you really don’t need to go that far. Instead, consider putting in your own shelving units to house everything from paint cans to camping gear to car parts (oil filters, spark plugs, shock absorbers for trucks, and so on). Then populate them with bins of varying sizes to give all of your disparate items their very own home, and slap on some labels so you can always find exactly what you’re looking for.

For more garage ideas on Stagetecture, click here.