Ideas For Organising Your Garage And Building Garage Storage
Garages can be useful areas for storing things you’d rather not keep in your home. However, without being organized properly, they can become little more than dumping grounds. With good intentions, we leave stuff in there for another day when we have the time and motivation to sort through it. If this sounds like your garage, then you will need to consider not only your storage options but also organising the equipment and other stuff in your garage. In the following article, we will look at some great tips for organising your better and creative storage ideas.
Clear Out
Before you do anything else, the most important step to organising your unruly is clearing out all the things you don’t need or want. Go through everything methodically and create three piles – keep, sell/donate and rubbish. Make areas in your drive or garage for these three piles and if you want a that is easier to manage in future, you need to be as merciless as possible.
Get rid of anything you haven’t used in 2 years or more, any toys that children have outgrown and those broken items (even the ones you keep saying you will fix) that are probably beyond repair and out of date household chemicals. Now take the items you are keeping and separate them into general categories, placing them in either stackable plastic boxes or cardboard boxes with stickers that indicate what’s inside them. For example – keep all hand tools together, all sports equipment together and all garden tools together.
Design a Floor Plan
Although it may seem like overkill, it is a good idea to have a general floor plan as this will help you work out where you are going to put everything to best maximise the available space. Measure the dimensions of your garage, including the size and location of switches, receptacles, doors and any windows. You also need to factor in the amount of space your car takes up and then follow these general rules:
- Place items that are used together, lawn chemicals and gardening tools for instance, in the same area of your garage.
- Place bulkier items and equipment, such as lawnmowers and hedge trimmers in corners, to avoid them being bumped into or knocked over especially if you have something like an automatic roller garage door.
- Store the items you use regularly closer to the door, such as bikes and similar equipment.
- Put the least rarely used or those items only used seasonally in the most hard-to-reach spots.
Expert Tip – Keep Things Off The Floor
By storing things off the floor you will not only free up space for your car and moving around in your garage, but will also avoid unsightly and clunky piles that will put you back to square one. By far the best way to achieve this is by either investing in shelving or building your own shelving units.
Open Shelving Is Best
Shelving is a much better option than alternatives such as cabinets for a number of reasons including the fact that they are less expensive and provide you with much easier access. they also enable you to scan things you have stored easier. Shelves don’t need to be particularly fancy, but they should be designed for the items you actually have.
In addition to flat shelving, hanging systems or racks are useful for keeping bulky items and equipment with long handles off the floor. Tool racks and even pegboards are also practical solutions. The less space taken up on shelves by larger items can then be used more effectively for items such as paint tins and garden chemicals etc.
Author Bio
Josh Andrews is keen on home design and Home improvement. Dabbling in home automation solutions is his current hobby, and he won’t be happy until everything he owns is accessable through his phone.
