photo credit: currybet

I am helping a friend sell some stuff on ebay and Craigslist because her one goal before winter is to be able to fit her car in the garage.  Wow, she has so much stuff in there that only one of their two cars fits in the three car garage.  There are couches, dining room set, exercise bikes, dog crates, a Christmas tree, bicycles, a treadmill and just mountains of stuff.  You should have seen us.  We pulled everything out into the driveway after work last night to try to get the big stuff out and take pictures so we could list it online.  Her neighbors kept stopping by and wanted to know if she was having a garage sale this weekend.  The actually thought she was starting on Tuesday to get ready for Saturday.  It is so much stuff but a garage sale is not in her plans.

We managed to get the photos we needed before it got dark and got everything put back (tossed) in the garage.  We then went over to the local Home Depot and picked up some shelves and big hooks so she can hang the bicycles up on the ceiling when they aren’t in use.  I figure that even if we sell everything, she has hours of fun ahead of her to get everything she is keeping put away.

I am luckier than most since my husband built two large connected garages that are larger in square footage than our house.  I found that the best way to keep them organized is to use all available space from the floor to the ceiling.  We have pallet racks in our garage now that go almost all the way up to the 18 foot ceilings.

At our last house we had a standard three car garage and we put in retail shelves, the kind they use at Walmart, with the pegboard back and adjustable metal shelves around the perimeter of the garage.  They were 7 feet tall and only 3 feet deep but the metal shelves made them very strong.  The retail shelves can be rather inexpensive if you watch for store closings and liquidations.

Your Daily 15 – Okay – let’s be real.  This is going to take more than 15 minutes but if you schedule just 15 minutes a day for a couple of weeks you may be able to get the garage in shape.  This is the perfect time of year to do a good cleaning of your garage, before the cold weather gets here.  Schedule a garage sale if you are so inclined to quickly get rid of the stuff you aren’t using or don’t want.  I know that people in my area are still having garage sales since the weather has been so nice.

Then, decide what really needs to be stored in the garage and get it off the floor.  One benefit that I have found to keeping stuff off of the floor is that there is less of a chance of something getting wrecked if you park a wet car inside or water seeps under the door.  Putting boxes of holiday decorations on shelves instead of stacking box after box on top of each other will help avoid the inevitable avalanche that always seems to happen when you want the box on the bottom.  If you have rafters in the garage get some industrial quality hooks to hang up things like bikes, weed eaters, etc.  If you or someone you know is remodeling their kitchen, put the old cabinets in the garage for extra storage.  You can even put shelves on top of the cabinets to make your storage space stretch all the way up to the ceiling.

There is nothing nicer than being able to open the garage door and drive your car out without having to scrape the ice off the windows or get soaked in the pouring rain.

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