Raise your hand if you knew we had a garage. I’m not surprised if most of you still have both hands firmly planted on your keyboards.
Well, we do. It’s a detached metal structure that potentially could park two cars. That is, if hadn’t been packed with junk for the past 2+ years (which is why we’ve never shown it to you except for some pics of it closed during our wedding). Here’s what it looked like at its worst back in February, right after debris from our kitchen remodel was at its peak:
Now let me defend myself for a second. From the moment we moved in, our garage was a storage facility for some of my sister’s furniture while she was waiting for her new house to be built. So we never knew our garage as a place for cars, we knew it as a place for stuff. And that’s what it quickly became. Everything ended up there: from empty boxes and unneeded furniture to half-full bags of garden soil and unused rollerblades.
But earlier this year I made the testosterone-fueled decision to reclaim my garage, for fear that I might get my man-card revoked. Not to mention the serendipitous fact that the completion of my sister’s house meant I’d finally be saying goodbye to a couple of space-hogging mattresses and couches. (Uh oh, do I also have to say goodbye to my man-card for using the word “serendipitous?”)
So Sherry and I took on the task of dividing our garage junk into groups: trash/recycle, sell/donate and keep. After a couple trips to the recycling center, our big yard sale and a hefty furniture pick-up from my sister, we ended up with a garage that looked like this:
Quite a “keep” pile, no? (Well, technically the black couch in the background was still waiting to be picked up). So the name of the game became “clean and organize”. We’ll spare you the gritty details (as well as the buggy, cobwebby details that caused me to clean with a long-handled broom), but at the end of this weekend our garage now looks like this – clean, organized and happily accepting vehicles:
Oh, and no that’s not a seating area in the back. That’s just a spray-painting project waiting to happen (stay tuned for that). We’ve still got a few more things headed to Goodwill, but overall our organizational system has far improved from this…
…to this:
And so far all it’s taken was a $40 plastic shelf from Home Depot. But we’re itching to hear your recommendations for garage organization. Any great shelving or hanging systems that you’d swear by? Any creative areas or zones that maximize your storage/working space? Now that we’ve cleared out the ol’ garage I’m ready to go organization-crazy up in there.
For more info about garage organization, check out this article from doityourself.com
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