The garage is probably one of the few rooms in your home that visitors rarely get to enter when they come to your home. Why? Because it is either poorly organized or it’s the room where you dump the things you don’t want people to see.
There could be many reasons as to why the garage is a no-go zone but the most common is poor organization. With the best garage organization ideas, you can turn your garage into a DIY workshop and still have enough room to store your sporting equipment and all other outdoor equipment.
Why Is Your Garage Always Full?
Before you freak out and hire a professional organizer, a garage, you need to figure out why your garage is always full. Is the garage too small? Do you have too many things or are you simply disorganized?
You need some serious soul searching and talk to family members to figure out the unnecessary stuff in the garage. Some of the things in your garage could have sentimental value and others are just useless. If your garage is too small, the best choice is to give out some of the unnecessary stuff to create room for the important stuff.
Even with the best garage organization skills, you will still need to create sufficient room.
7 Helpful Garage Organization Ideas to Make More Room
When looking to create room in your garage, the number one solution is to organize the room. You can style the room to ensure it aligns with the rest of your home decor.
Here are 7 helpful garage organization ideas to help you make some room.
1. Decide What to Store
Go through everything in your garage and separate the important and the useless stuff. Chances are that your garage is disorganized because you never took time to sort the items in it. Once you sort all the items in your garage, it will become easier to store them.
Dedicate one weekend to sorting the items into three categories; trash, keep and give away. Keep only the essentials, things like tools, out of season clothes, holiday decorations, sports equipment, and car necessities.
Things like paint, propane, pet food and anything made of paper should not be kept in the garage.
2. Consider Using the Ceiling as Storage Space
One of the most effective ways to organize a garage is to use dead space such as the ceiling. Add storage room to your ceiling as a way to increase storage space. Such spaces are ideal for items that are rarely used or used once a year.
This includes seasonal items such as Christmas decorations, trees, etc. You can create a rack for bike storage on the wall. Bike racks are actually very convenient and consume very little space. This will leave sufficient room to store other tools and equipment on the floor.
You can also create suspended shelves to fit and support heavy equipment. The more items you can store in your roof storage, the more floor space you will have.
3. Organize the Sections by Use or Activity
The idea behind garage organization is to create sufficient room for all your stuff and know exactly where all your tools and equipment are. The best way to do this is to create a garage layout where everything is organized into sections.
Begin by creating a section for seasonal items, where you can store seasonal clothes. Create another section for your work tools and DIY equipment.
Finally, you need another section for car supplies.
Now that everything is stored in their specific sections, you need to establish a limit. Like how much can you store in a single section? You want to create large sections especially for things such as tools and sports equipment.
Also, be sure to add labels to each section or box you use. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing that you have a particular item but not knowing exactly where it is. The pain of going through all the boxes in search of a single item is even worse.
To avoid this, invest in a label marker.
Open all the cabinets in your kitchen and take a good look around. You’ll quickly realize why you store everything behind closed cabinet doors. Open shelving allows you to store your items in much the same way, but it doesn’t hide your clutter. The same concept applies for your garage. Using cabinets made specifically for garages gives you a way to organize your items and store them behind closed doors for a finished look.
4. Try Magnet
Magnets have been known to support extreme weights, so why don’t you use it to organize your garage? Magnets can be very useful especially when storing tools. They make it easy to organize your bike rack.
All it takes is a magnetic tool holder or a magnetic strip. With either of these, you can store magnetic tools and pull them from the strip with minimal effort.
They come in a wide range of sizes that can be mounted on your wall either by attaching to another magnet or with screws.
5. Use Wire Shelves
The use of garage shelving is actually a very efficient way to save space. For example, you can use floating wire shelves to store some of the lighter things. This leaves enough room for larger, heavier items on the floor.
You can store your seasonal sports equipment on the floating shelf this will leave space for the current season’s sporting equipment.
There are so many garage-shelving ideas; you can also try the floor-to-ceiling wire shelves. It’s ideal for out of season clothes and decorations.
6. Hang Stuff on Your Wall
Tools like shovels, rakes, and hoes often take up too much space especially if they are poorly organized. The best way to counter this is by hanging such tools on the wall. Most gardening tools are too big to fit in a shelf or storage box, thus the best option is to hang them on your walls.
Also, they are used quite frequently thus should be easily accessible.
Now that you’ve decided on what you will hang on your walls, it’s time to decide on the technique. You can either use pegboards or slat boards. The latter gives you more flexibility and is more appealing.
7. Add Lockers in the Garage
Organizing your own stuff is easy but when you include those of your family members, it complicates everything. To reduce the hassle, you can install lockers for each family member. This makes it easy for all your family members to organize their belongings while keeping your garage organized.
Members will be accountable for their own things.
Bring It All Together Using These Garage Organization Ideas
With very little money spent, you can transform your garage into a serene space for all your DIY projects. It takes only a few weekends to sort and organize everything.
If you follow the above garage organization ideas, you should be able to create a comfortable garage and maximize space for additional storage.
Read more on our blog for more self-improvement ideas.
