Here Are The Top 5 Garage Organizing Mistakes
To make your decluttering truly efficient best to keep in mind some usual organizing mistakes that some folks do.
We’ve talked a lot about HOW-TO organize your garage in our previous blogs, 6 Tips That Will Help Efficiently Organize Your Garage, and How to Organize & Maintain a Great Garage. Still, we haven’t gone over what NOT TO DO! There are a lot of common mistakes and misconceptions about organizing that can lead you to an even bigger mess to deal with than what you started with. Here are the top 5 mistakes we see that you can avoid:
Allow Yourself Enough Time! Have you ever said to yourself, “I’m going to organize my garage this afternoon”? If so, you probably quickly realized that it is not an afternoon project. Give yourself a full weekend to tackle this project, so you have enough time to get things organized in a way that will help you STAY organized later. If you throw everything back into the garage, it’s only a matter of time until you have to go back and organize it again. Don’t forget to check the weather – you’ll want a nice couple of days so you can spread out.
Don’t go it alone! Unless you have a tiny garage and you live by yourself, don’t try to tackle it on your own. You didn’t accrue the mess on your own, so don’t try to fix it all by yourself, either. Enlist your family, friends, or even your kids to help. One or two helpers is enough – if you have more than that, things can get confusing. This will also make it easier to lift heavier or bulkier items as you move things around, and hey, it makes for a better time. Turn on the radio, grab some lemonade, and have some fun with it!
Spread things out if you’re trying to organize your already overcrowded garage without opening the door and spreading things out, you’re going to run into a problem – no space! Don’t be embarrassed to spread things out on your lawn or driveway while you’re in the process of cleaning and organizing. You have to get everything out to get to the cobwebs and really figure out where you’re going to place things when you put them back in. This will also allow you to see what items you use and what things are stuffed in a corner, broken, or forgotten about so that you can decide if you really want to keep them or not.
Use the space! Don’t just use the floor or small shelves – really USE the space in your garage. Use the rafters, use the walls, everything! By getting things off the floor, you’ll free up much more room for your car and avoid those sloppy, impossible-to-sort-through piles. You can hide larger items like ladders, sleds, and even storage bins by putting them up in the rafters or hanging them from the ceiling.
Don’t BUY more stuff! Wait until you have sorted through everything, decided what you’re keeping, and get rid of the excess to start looking at storage solutions, wall systems, or bins. We see this all the time, and all the extra stuff you buy just ends up taking up space and collecting dust. Once you have an idea of precisely what you have to organize, you can select the appropriate types of solutions that best fit your stuff and your garage.
Now that you know what to watch out for, hopefully, it will be easier to whip your garage or workspace into shape as the weather gets warmer. Until next time – Keep It Simple!
