Garages. We love them, but they have an annoying habit of looking like a bombsite every day of the year. You just throw stuff in there, hoping for the best, and the room winds up looking awful. A messy garage is not somewhere you want to spend your time – not usually, anyway.
Turns out, though, there are some genius hacks for sorting your garage out. These ideas help you both store all your stuff and park your car. It’s amazing. Read on to find out more.
Take A Deep Breath
Addressing mess in the garage can feel overwhelming, especially if yours is full of stuff already. Sometimes, it’s so packed you can’t even get in. Boxes, luggage, tubs of paint and step ladders are all over the place. All the stuff you don’t want in your house is in there.
First, take a deep breath. Organising the garage is possible. You just need to do things one step at a time.
Start by taking all the stuff out of the garage, piece by piece, so you’re not always having to manoeuvre around stuff. Once everything is out on the driveway or lawn, it becomes much more apparent how much space you have and what you can reasonably keep inside the garage itself.
When you remove items, try to put them into different categories. All your bike stuff could go in one pile, DIY things in another, and Christmas decorations in another. You get the idea.
Sweep Your Floors
Most garages wind up with dirty floors, primarily because of the way owners use them. Grab a broad brush and sweep the floors, removing all the clutter and detritus. When sorting out your garage, you want to start with a clean slate so you can imagine the space after your renovations and reorganization.
Develop A Floor Plan
Once you’ve removed everything and cleaned the up your brick-built or Wooden Garage, the next step is to develop a comprehensive floor plan, showing you where you’ll put everything. The layout is essential, as this will tell you whether you have enough space for all your stuff, and a car.
You can create a floorplan on the computer or using a pen and paper. If you’re not good with visuals, you can simply place tape on the floor, showing where everything will go.
If you have a lot of stuff in your garage, you may have to remove some of it permanently and put it somewhere else in your home. Don’t be afraid to use your attic if that’s available, or possibly consider a larger outbuilding or storage space. Companies like Sunward Steel Buildings in Utah (or another local to you) can help when it comes to designing quality steel buildings to fit your needs. Steel buildings like these are great for storage purposes as they are strong, study, and relatively cheap.
Make Sure Your Garage Door Works Properly
Both mechanical and electronic garage doors rely on complicated mechanisms that may only last for a few years before they need the service of someone like this company offering Garage door repair Texas, depending on how frequently they’re put to work. Typically they’ll always give up of just when you need them the most, it seems this is always the case. When the door doesn’t work quite as well as it used to or has stopped working entirely, it tempts owners to use their garages as a dumping ground for whatever stuff they don’t want in the house.
Take some time to fix up your door, or call in a professional if you don’t know how to do it. Learn how to program a replacement garage door remote so you can easily access your garage from the car once you sort it out.
Put Like Items Together
The next step is to put all similar items together when you start putting them back into your garage again. This process helps with keeping things neat, tidy and compact, allowing you to find them quickly later.
Just like the kitchen, garage items, tend to come in all shapes and sizes and never really fit together neatly. We suggest buying generic containers and then placing items inside those to keep the room looking neat and tidy as you enter. Take advantage of attractive tubs, cabinets, closets and chests of drawers – whatever you have to hand.
Stack Items Up The Walls
Garages are notoriously cramped spaces. When architects first began including them, they intended for motor vehicles to occupy them and pretty much nothing else. That’s not, however, how things ultimately worked out. Families wanted storage for a bunch of household items that wouldn’t fit in the house – hence the modern garage problems most of us have.
The trick here is to use all of the available volume in the garage by stacking items up the walls. Don’t be afraid to install shelving that goes up to the roof. This helps you add more storage above the level where regular cabinets and chests of drawers finish.
If you can’t fit everything back in your newly organized garage you can invest in an outdoor lockup or simply put it somewhere else.
