Can you park a car or maybe two in your garage? Can we walk up to the workbench?

Now is the best time of the year to put some order in the garage chaos that you have been living with for too long.  Take advantage of the remaining days of good weather left this summer to finally tackle the mass accumulation of stuff in your garage.  

Determine 3 achievable goals for your garage.

1. Park a car in the garage,

2. Walk up to the work bench, not over stuff to get to it.

3. Have a cleared off workbench to step up to and work on a project.

One contractor I worked with had those three goals in mind but his garage was so crammed full of stuff there was literally no more room.  So he set a goal to only keep what he needed to complete three remaining projects.  He wanted to park a car in the garage and be able to walk up to his workbench. This is how we helped him reach his goals:

Make space

1st We spread a tarp on the driveway and brought out all the extra electrical wire, and there was lots of it, then all the plumbing supplies.  We consolidated all the somewhat white latex paint into one 5-gallon bucket.  All the scraps of metal were sold. We continued to bring things out to the tarp for the gentleman to go through and select what he would keep. Remember, his goal was to keep only what he would need for the final three projects.

Group like things

2nd Each category of supplies was put into groups and placed on racks stacked floor to ceiling along all the walls of the garage.  So we had all the electrical supplies grouped, all the plumbing, all the paints and painting supplies, all the medium sized tools then all the large tools. In front of the workbench on the wall we placed a pegboard to hold the tools he most often needed for his projects, so he had at his fingertips what he used and needed.  We also had a row of racks in the area between the where the cars would be parked.  Every inch of wall space was used so nothing rested on the floors which made for easy cleaning. A blower could make quick work of cleanup.

Properly store

3rd We used the ceiling too with pre-built racks for mounting on the ceiling to hold boxes of things he used or needed only once a year or so.

Let it go!

As we worked at selecting what would remain and what would go, we had a trash pile and a giveaway pile.  Then a junk truck arrived to haul away all the junk stuff.

Selling the scrap metal helped pay the cost of the ceiling racks.

The contractor was able to make better use of his time and was more efficient about how he ran his business with order instead of chaos in his garage. He completed his three projects and had more room to walk around in his garage.  He was very pleased.