“Go clean up the garage.” Those are five very dreadful words. Everyone hates trying to declutter a garage. For whatever reason, the garage always seems to become a mess.
It becomes a catch-all for everything from random seasonal stuff to unfinished projects to cardboard boxes. Oh so many cardboard boxes. I just look around my neighborhood and see all the cars that are in people’s driveways because they won’t fit in the garage.
If you are reading this, it’s likely because you are trying to figure out how to declutter a garage. Trying to declutter a garage is unique challenge though because it tends to be an area where the solution tends to be less about decluttering and more about utilizing your space in a better manner.
This is because unlike other rooms in the house, the garage doesn’t tend to have furniture. It’s generally a large empty room that you put cars in.
As I looked at our garage, I realized almost everything in there belonged in the garage. I’m not going to store power tools in the living room where I’ve got shelves!
The bikes took up a lot of room too. Most everything actually belonged in the garage but it just looked horrible! Now our garage is neat (most of the time) and we can always park our cars in there. So how did I do it?
Steps to Declutter A Garage
Step 1: Take Inventory and do a Primary Purge
The first step to declutter a garage is to take inventory of what you have. Now I don’t mean create a exhaustive physical list, but at least get a good idea of what you have. Power tools, lawn maintenance equipment, car maintenance tools, bikes, outdoor kids toys, the whole 9 yards.
When you are taking inventory, this is a great time to do what I call ‘The Primary Purge’. This means that as I am doing an initial look over of what I’ve got in the garage, if I see broken or useless items or things I never use, I just get rid of them on the spot.
In some cases this means putting things in the garbage, in other cases it meant putting things in a donation bin. You can’t declutter a garage unless you know what you are working with. It’s also a whole lot easier to organize a garage if you have less stuff to work with..
As I was taking inventory and getting rid of things, I realized that largely everything out there belonged out there, but without any proper storage solutions it was a giant mess.
Step 2: Identify Usable Space
The next thing to do when you declutter a garage is to identify how much usable space you have. Usable space was whatever space you have leftover after the garage is utilized for what you want it for.
In my case that was to park my cars, but maybe that is your workout equipment or even a workbench that you use for your hobbies. This is especially important when you’ve got large items that need to go in your garage, as you may need to work around them.
Once I figured out what kind of useable space I had, I went on to the next step.
3: Visualize Your Space
When you declutter a garage, you really need to visualize the space. I put this step in here because it really helped me figure out a plan for how I wanted to utilize my space.
For example, I realized that the way I was using my space was very poor. If I parked the car in closer to the garage door I’d free up a ton of space. From there I started visualizing the various things I had and how I’d want to store them using the space I had. Which lead me to an important thing I wasn’t thinking of previously:
Step 4: Figure Out How to Utilize Space Vertically and Above
The garage represents a unique space where it’s not necessarily an issue to add in shelving that is hanging from the ceiling. When you declutter a garage, often times the issue is less about having too much stuff and more about not having a good organizational system.
Unlike other places, the garage is not as likely to be a space where you are trying for aesthetics. So this is the perfect place to put hanging storage.
Depending on the height of your garage, you can use this to gain back space that would be otherwise wasted. For example, we keep a chest freezer and a refrigerator in our garage for long term food storage. Due to their size and shape, we could put wall shelving above them.
Enter the ceiling shelves. With those, we were then able to utilize all of that space for storage. It made an ideal spot for all of our holiday decorations and things we really only needed to access once or twice a year.
One thing I will note is don’t put this type of storage above your vehicles. You don’t want to risk anything falling on your vehicles, especially if you don’t properly install them.
For vertical shelving, look at things like pegboards and shelves you can hang on the wall. For example, we found a tire rack that hangs about 8 feet off the ground for our winter snow tires. This works great because it freed up all the space on the ground while looking nice and giving us way more room.
On this same train of thought, we realized we could save room by hanging our bikes on the wall and installing hooks for things like brooms, shovels, rakes, and even our folding chairs.
While it might not be super aesthetically pleasing, we wasted very little space on our walls to ensure that we had maximized our space so that as new and often times temporary items came into the garage we didn’t have to rearrange everything to accommodate.
So for example, right now our kids have PoweWheel trucks. With our upgraded storage we had room for them so we didn’t have to rearrange the garage.
As you are implementing storage onto your walls and ceiling, take a moment and ask yourself if the items you are going to be putting up there are worth the time and effort. Use this as an opportunity to get rid of things that you just don’t want to store.
Step 5: Utilize Standardized Storage Containers
Mismatched storage containers are the bane of my existence and not because they don’t match. When I organized my garage, I picked up a ton of those Black and Yellow Costco Storage tubs. Why?
Because when you have mismatched storage containers, you end up wasting a lot of space. The pile of clear plastic containers that had various tools or Christmas items in them took up far more room than a single Costco Storage tub and held significantly less items. Also when you have to remove them from the shelves, these all stack nicely.
Even when taking stuff off of shelves it is far more efficient to use standardized containers. The amount of times that I had to dig through a stack of boxes to get to what I was after because it was on the bottom was absurd.
Then the boxes ended up either in a very wobbly stack on the garage floor or spread out across the garage floor to avoid them falling. Then you have to put all of them back! It takes forever!
So, I organized things into the appropriate tubs, labeled them, and then put them all up on the shelves nicely. The result was very little wasted space and a neat and clean looking garage area.
While you are doing this, this is an ideal time to do a final purge of items. When you declutter a garage, you want to make sure you aren’t putting things back into storage that you don’t want or need.
Key Takeaways to Declutter a Garage
Overall it’s pretty simple to declutter a garage to get it clean and organized. The key items to remember are as follows:
- Inventory and remove items that don’t belong.
- Identify space that could be better utilized and visualize how you want to use it.
- Install storage on the walls and above or even additional floor shelving if you have room
- Standardize your storage containers.
Once you’ve gone through this process, your garage should be a neat and orderly place!