When I tell people that I am a Professional Organizer they usually ask me what that means. When I explain that I help people declutter and rediscover spaces that may be overwhelming. I often get , “oh my… I could really use help in my garage”.
Now here is a secret I am only going to share with you (in a totally public forum)…the garage is not my favorite area of the house. When my husband and I design our houses we keep our garage just big enough for two cars and a little bit of “garage storage”. We try to keep our garage to car and outdoor stuff. What that means in real life is that we do not have much discretionary, “oh throw that in the garage” room (again, this is on purpose but can create creative storage solutions). Keeping it neat and tidy can be a challenge.
Not all garages are the built the same. I have seen garages that can handle lots of extra storage and some that barely even fit one car. I decided to show a small garage makeover in a couple different makeover stages. To show a couple examples of “afters”. We will begin with the 80% in version.
The first step was to address the layout. We did not have much of a choice in this garage so we settled on repurposing a few of the mix and match shelving and purchased a few matching shelving units (this is what we picked).
Time to dig in. It was raining a bit that day (of course, after a week of sunshine)so we pulled the cars out and sorted everything into the center of the space. We took this opportunity to sweep and vacuum all the hard to reach places. Some spiders may have displaced in the making of this make over (so sorry, not sorry). After that we sorted our “keeps” back onto the shelves. Keeping all like items in the same area. We created a nice pile of things that need to find new happy homes and threw out a few things.
Now that we can see what is needed and where we will put it, bins have been ordered. We will see. Do pretty matching bins really make the difference? Stay tuned…(suspenseful music here).