Ok, so, now that the inside closets are all organized, and your kitchen is hopefully still going strong from February, it’s time to get a bit more fresh air.
The focus shifts to the garage!
Spring is the perfect time to declutter and organize a garage. Use the warm weather to your advantage and pull stuff out from all the nooks and crannies! Uncover some of that chaos from winter and get the garage ready for all the yard work, bikes, and summer toys that are about to wreak havoc on the garage!
If you were able to keep a car in yours for the winter, then you are already way ahead of me! If you were not able to get a car in your garage this past winter, you might have a bit too much stuff in there!
The first order of business will simply be moving stuff around so that you can see what you actually have. Once you can see a big portion of the floor, set up your decluttering stations, you know – those old labels of keep, donate or sell, and toss! Declutter some of last year’s toys that are broken or that people in your household no longer use.
Get the whole family in it. Pick a day of the week when everyone can get out there and work together. If you can’t devote a whole day, just think smaller. Use an hour most nights or mornings to get everyone involved in getting rid of stuff. I always find that the garage is one of those spaces where the clutter can build up so quickly because everyone has a part of adding stuff to it. Even worse, people sometimes have a tendency to put things away the quick and easy way instead of taking the time to do it the right way!
If you have enough stuff in your donate or sell pile, it may be worth considering a garage sale to get rid of a bunch of stuff all at once.
Once you’re happy with your donate/sell/toss piles, go ahead and examine your keep pile more closely. Try to think of the keep stuff in terms of categories. For example, lump all of the gardening stuff together, or put all the tools together, put kids’ sports equipment together. Once you know roughly how much stuff you want to store in the garage, you can start to think about the best storage methods. Figure out what kind of storage would benefit you the most based on your keep items. Think about both the stuff you want to store and the storage capacity of the garage. You may even be able to go vertical, depending on whether or not you have a lot of height in your garage like open rafters or a small attic space.
Use the first part of April to really go through all of the stuff in the garage, declutter, and then categorize the rest. The second part of April is when you can get into building or buying better storage solutions that can accommodate your stuff the best!
Someday I will be able to store a vehicle in my garage! But it won’t happen without a bit of hard work.
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