Truth be told, if you are a car owner, it’s very possible that a garage holds a very intimate spot in your heart. This is because it’s the bedroom for one of the most valuable investment–your car. However, since it’s one of those isolated spaces, most people struggle to keep their garages organized. It’s not surprising to find a garage littered with power tools, lawn tools, sports equipment, and other junk which makes it almost impossible to locate anything.
But who said that a garage doesn’t require the soft tender touch? In this article, we have compiled a few tips to organize your garage making it a practical and functional space. They are easy to implement and it will take a few days before you start to see the changes.
Clean the Garage
Remember the adage “Rome wasn’t built in a day?” it also means that garage arrangement will have to start in small baby steps and gradually progress. A good starting point is to clean up. You can start by assigning all the tools to different categories: e.g. sports, power, lawns etc and proceed to pack them in large cartons. Place them outside and proceed to clean the floor and shelves. If possible you can paint the floor as it helps in making the future cleaning process easier.
Sort the Stuff
Once done with cleaning the walls and the floors, proceed to sort out what you need to keep, what you will donate, and what to throw away. After the profiling, clean all the tools you have chosen to keep and return them to be arranged.
Cluster Similar Items Together
Another key element of keeping your garage organized is clustering your items. When arranging your stuff, have at the back of mind the convenience and how frequently you use particular items. For instance, frequently used portable air compressors for tires, impact wrenches and drills can be hung at the height level where they can be easily reached.
For the small nuts and bolts, organize them according to size and place them in buckets. This way, it becomes much easier to locate them as they have a fixed location. For other smaller tools, install a magnet strip around loose pieces such as drill bits where you can easily grab them.
Label Everything In The Garage
After clustering, it’s now time to completely label everything. And when we labeling, it doesn’t mean only using letters, you can choose to be creative to color code to indicate what goes where. Additionally, if you are working with a large family, it can be hard to trace who created a mess, always try and designate dedicate places for respective family members. This way, everyone is responsible for their own space, plus it becomes easier to pinpoint who isn’t playing their part.
Maximize Wall Space
Walls are a prime piece of real estate in maximizing garage space. This is because they can accommodate almost every object or tool irrespective of the size and shape. For starters, you can create shelves or hire a carpenter to help you. Shelves give the term arrangement a whole new meaning as they can be fitted with doors leaving your garage super-neat.
If you like to exploit your creative side, wire baskets can be hung on the walls to acts as holding racks.
Designate Spots for Large Items like Bikes
Bikes occupy large spaces in the garage. It’s on this ground that they should a dedicated “parking spot” where everyone can place their bike. For this, you can use bike hooks to hang the bikes on the walls to leave the floor with extra space.
Have a Recycling Station
There is no single eureka moment when a garage becomes messy. It all starts with minor throwing away of plastic bottles and before you know it, everything is pretty messed up. To avert such kind of a scenario, have a recycling station where you can throw plastics and cardboard boxes and you will start appreciating a cleaner garage.
Create a Garage Mudroom
Prevention is always better than cure. Instead of having to deal with a messy garage floor, you can take it upon yourself to stop clutter before finding its way into the garage. Have a mudroom where everyone leaves their muddy shoes and you will be surprised as to the effect it can have on the cleanliness of your garage.
Reign in on the Ceiling Space
This may come as a no-brainer suggestion but you will appreciate the amount of space it leaves your garage with. Ceilings are some of the best storage spots after the walls. This is because no one gets to walk into them plus they are easily accessible using a small ladder. There are multiple ceiling storage blueprints, but perhaps the best is the sliding storage model. You can screw sealable plastic bins on the ceiling and throw in a few stuff and you are good to go.
DIY Duct Tape Dispenser For Your Garage
Duct tapes are a garage staple. Occasionally, you will find a number of rolls lying around which not only leaves the garage messy but may also end up damaging them. For an easy multi-roll-duct-dispatcher, you can use salvaged wood to create this handy solution and mount it on the wall which will leave your garage perfectly organized and your tapes neatly kept.
Utilize the Spaces Under the Shelves
Yes! Garage organization calls for utilizing every available space. Now, since the space under the shelves is normally out of eye’s reach, many people tend to overlook it. However, you can store your small screws inside hanging jars. Simply drill holes at the center of the jar’s lid and screw them under the shelves. After that, you can proceed to mount them onto the lids.
Final Thoughts
Organizing your garage doesn’t have to be a mundane, back-breaking, and costly affair. With that said, it needs a systematic approach right from cleaning to how you arrange the different cohort of tools and equipment. Whether you are looking to organize and expansive garage or just a minimalistic one, the above-stated tips will help you do exactly that. At the end of it all, you get to utilize that garage space and reward yourself with an extra storage without suffocating the car parking area.
About the author
This is a guest post written by Roman D. Milovidov – the self-mechanic, author and resident expert on rims, tires and other cars-related stuff. If you are planning to change your garage and to make it clean and well-organized these tips are for you!
I hope you found these tips on organizing your garage helpful. I would love to hear some of your garage organizational tips and hacks.
As always, if you need help getting your home and life organized, register for my free “5 Days to an Organized Home & Life” email course. Each day you will receive strategies for keeping your home & life organized and having a “company ready” home at all time. You can register for the free course at www.decoratorsvoice.com/free5daycourse.
For information about my Full Home & Life Organizational Strategies course, please visit www.decoratorsvoice.com/homestrategiescourse. In this course, you’ll receive tons of useful information, a one on one private consultation, access to my private Facebook group, and a physical organizational kit.
Thanks for stopping by. If you have any organizational or decorating questions, please do not hesitate to ask. I would love to hear from you. For information concerning our decorating services and products, please visit www.divineelementsofdesign.net
Awesome tips! I’m going to implement most, if not all of them. My garage is a scary place right now!
I don’t have a garage, and I’m not sure when I would be getting one in the future, but I loved these tips! I am all for organizing things, and the tips always transfer over to any area in your home! Good job 🙂
So much good advice here. Our current garage is being used for storage since our house is pretty small. We have plans to build a new home next year where we do plan on using the garage for the car!! Woohoo lol Anyway, I’m saving these tips so I can make use of them in the future. Thanks!
Some great tips here! I treat my garage with an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach, so I can definitely utilise a few of these.
Excellent tips! Nice write up too along with images. Some helpful tactics I learnt from here & I must apply those in my garage. Thank you so much for sharing.
Awesome tips! It’s time to organize my messy garage now! Thanks for sharing this helpful tips! Cheers!
You’re very welcome, thanks for reading and commenting.
Taking care of your like car it’s one of your own kids. It really is necessary to be maintained regularly to lasts a long long time specially for a new car.
Thanks to the author for the useful article! I believe that anyone who reads it before arranging the garage will be able to save time and money, and organize the garage very conveniently and efficiently.
I especially liked the idea of making a recycling station for plastic bottles from car wash products, antifreeze, oil and other numerous automotive chemicals. It is small, but important contribution to taking care of the environment!
Thanks for the great tips! I am usually a very organised person, but even I find it difficult to organise all the junk we have stored in the garage. Which is weird, because each spring we go through everything in there and throw away a ton of stuff, but somehow you can’t notice an improvement in the clutter when everything is stuffed in boxes all over the place. We have a garage for two cars that can barely fit one. I will definitely try some of your tips, especially the one about utilising wall space.
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This is some really good information about how to organize a garage. It is good to know that it would be smart to start by cleaning out the garage. It seems like it would be smart to make sure that garage door is working properly when cleaning out your garage as well.
This is some great data about how to sort out a carport. It is great to realize that it is savvy to begin by wiping out the carport. It appears as though it is keen to ensure that carport entryway is working legitimately when wiping out your carport too.
Cordless drills are one of the best tools that you can use for small work activities. It is so helpful at home doing small work activities.
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Awesome tips
I liked what you said about how it would be smart to use helves in my garage. I might want to also get a really sturdy garage door. That way, I don’t have to worry about the wind getting to the stuff in my garage.
I like that you mentioned to cluster items that are similar to each other. That way, the small parts become easier to locate for my wife and I. In case that we have trouble on these tips, we will need a garage door installation expert to help us out.
Thanks for sharing! Great post. I love when everything is perfectly arranged in the garage and it doesn’t look like a mess.
Thanks for stopping by. The garage doesn’t have to look a mess. It can be organized and clean as well.
I think everyone could use these tips !! I can’t think of one garage I have seen that didn’t need a good organising solution !
Thanks for reading. Have a great day!!
Very resourceful article. I have a garage and this article will be handy in helping me rearrange my tools such as the drill bits and torque wrenches. I wish there was a way we could organize the bigger units such as snow blowers and lawn mowers. It’s kind of confusing to me.
Thank you for your advice about labeling everything in the garage. Since I share it with my clumsy and careless brother, I have always struggled to organize the equipment and tools I have in our garage. I think choosing to be creative and color-coding everything is a good way to sort everything we have in the garage and will also allow my brother to easily return the things he had used in their proper places.
seems very informative. thanks for sharing with us. Awaiting for next article..
I love the look of wood garage doors, and I’m glad to see there’s a lot of options in terms of price and quality. Adding hardware is a nice touch as well. Thanks for sharing the tips.
These are some great tips! And you’ve got it right; it makes a massive difference. Choosing the right technic can be pretty tricky, but this guide made it a lot simpler! Thank you so much for writing; this was helpful!
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Oh my God. Finally, I got my all of answer here. We moved to our new house last month and the garage is so small. I didn’t have idea how to organize it. We have so many large items: lawn mower, bikes… Thanks for sharing these tips!
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Great; Thank you for sharing this tips of garage.
Great Tips! I wasn’t sure on where and how to start organizing our garage until I found this blog. It really helped me a lot. Thank you!
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Oh we really need to put up some bike racks on the walls for our bicycles, it really is a pain having them lying around all the time. I’m loving your point about using the ceiling space. Our garage is quite small which means storage space is very limited. If we make use of the ceiling space we will have plenty of extra room and our garage will look superb.
Good tips. I’m currently working on most of these.
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These tips are very useful, every person should prepare his car before he goes create garage organization. Thanks for your special tips
Great tips! I’m still figuring out this whole thing. But it helps a lot.
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Hello
I dont have any garage. But, still its a great artile to read.Hope to implement your ideas when i will construct a garage for myself.
Thanks
Great Post! This post is very helpful to buy air compressor parts. Thanks for sharing such a amazing post.
I like your tips. The organization is an important topic for improving house, especially for the garage. I like to use organizers, drawer dividers, and storage boxes for my garage to reduce the time wasted on cleaning.