Step 1: Reorganize to Organize

Make life easier and start with a clean slate. Begin by removing everything from the garage and placing it in the driveway. Create three piles; garbage, donation, and keep. After creating your piles, put the garbage in a dumpster. Here at Homewood Disposal, we have a friendly and easy process for renting a dumpster. Learn more here

Now that you are done with garbage, move onto your donation pile. Rather than throwing everything away, your garbage may be someone else’s treasure. You can then find a local donation center such as Salvation Army or Goodwill and give your items away. Goodwill is a company that strives to provide everyone with a job.  In 2020 alone, they impacted more than 1 million individuals.

All that remains is to work with the items you want to keep. This is the fun part! Organizing items can be time consuming, but the result is rewarding. Before you bring them back into the garage, place the items you want to keep into smaller groupings. Helpful categories are frequently used items, Holiday extras, tools, fluids, and garden items. Whatever fits your lifestyle, create groups. This practice will help you know where all your items are, but also help you go through your items once more and find duplicates.

Step 2: Add Storage Cabinets

Now that you have all your things separated, you need places to put them. Many options are available for building or adding to your garage. Every garage is built different and has different storage capabilities. When looking at options, the heavier the items you have the more stable shelving you are going to need. Metal shelves are very popular in garages, hold heavy items, and tend to last longer than other types of shelving. Cabinets are also a great way to store smaller items. Using cabinets can help hide some of those things you don’t want everyone seeing or things you don’t use every day. Cabinets can also hide the hammer, spray paint, and heavy-duty items that you don’t want the kids getting into.

A popular way to optimize space is creating wall shelving. Including items such as racks, wall-mounted organization system, magnets to hang mental tools, etc. The ideas are endless.  A fun do-it-yourself trick for fishing storage is to create your own hook holder. Take PVC pipe on the bottom and a pool noodle on top and your all set. To learn more, click here. Another great trick is to use overhead storage. Using overhead storage for Christmas decorations and other bulky items opens your garage for daily use.

Step 3: Add Storage Bins

We have our shelves and cabinets, now we can add storage bins. For extra organization, use bins on your shelves to hide all those random items. 80% of garage clutter comes from disorganization, not from lack of storage or garage shelves. Many commonly used bins are the popular large plastic storage bins. With the help of our storage shelves, we can avoid just stacking these bins on top each other and having a hard time reaching the bottom bin. Avoid bins stacked in a corner. This makes it hard to access the bins and it is hard to know what’s inside. With labeled shelves or bins, you can easily retrieve what you need. It makes life a little easier when you’re a little one who can’t find his cleats for soccer and can just look in the “soccer bin”