The garage is one of the most important – and most abused – parts of every house. We use garages mostly for storage and parking cars, and while it’s pretty easy to get a pressure washer and other cleaning materials and run through the place from time to time, a lot of us face troubles with keeping our garages clean for long.
Moreover, the following tips will help enhance your ability to do so:
Take Everything Out
One of the most significant problems that you’ll have to deal with as you try to clean and organize your garage is clutter. Most people use their garages to store just about everything, and this leads to a mess. So, decluttering is usually the first step towards organization. Consider the aid of a waste disposal aid.
When you’re decluttering, the first step is to find out what’s in the garage. So, pull out everything in it and sort through them. Apart from helping you to keep things that you need, decluttering will also help you to understand the space you have to work with and form ideas on optimizing it. Before you do so, rent a dumpster in this link to make the cleaning process more efficient and reduce your work as you won’t have to think about waste later. The waste company will pick it up after you’re done.
Optimize the Rearrangement Process
A bit tied to the previous point, this one deals more with the items that will be allowed to go back into the garage. When you pull everything out, you need to be disciplined and set rules that will guide the items that you keep.
This top will help you to speed up the organization process by preventing any agonizing considerations. When deciding the items that you can keep and the ones that shouldn’t be going back, identify the reason for the item being in the garage – is there a reason for this? Or is the item just there because you couldn’t find what to do with it.
If you find that it’s the latter, then it might be the perfect time for you to part ways with the item. Note the following:
- If you’ve used an item more than once in the past 12 months, it can be reinstated
- You can also keep items that are used in seasons – umbrellas, snowmobiles, etc. As long as you can organize them and put them in place, be free to keep them
- Sort through your tools and keep those that you might not be able to borrow or rent
Embrace Hanging
Now that you’ve decided to keep certain items in the garage, you also need to understand where they will be. The entire point of garage organization is space optimization, and if you find that square footage is a bit of a challenge, then you could also use the walls as a placement pad.
You can get a pegboard with hooks to hang things vertically. Things like gardening tools and other mechanisms have handles for you to hold them so that you can hang them by their handles on the walls. Tennis rackets, bags, and even bicycles can be hung as well – especially since you don’t use them every day.
As for bicycles and bikes, you could also get a stud finder to screw an “S” hook to the ceiling and hang them there by their tires. Doing this will make them easier to dismount when you need them, and they won’t be in the way if you choose to park your car in your garage too.
Label Storage Spaces
As stated earlier, the major challenge of keeping garages clean is that they hold a lot of things. Often, we clean our garages, and they stay like that for a few weeks, then we go in, remove items from shelves, and return them haphazardly. In time, everything becomes a mess again, and you’re back to square one.
To better prevent this from happening, you can designate places where specific items will be stored. If you have a shelf or a bucket where something is stored, label it, so you or anyone else looking to return something they took from the garage will be able to do so.
However, while designated spaces are a great way to go, it’s also worth noting that none of these will work without discipline. A lot of us use our garages like storage units, and as long as you don’t put in the effort to return something to where it should be, you’ll have the problem of disorganization. Just in case, a garage door installation service should be up your alley to replace worn out garage doors and garage door springs. So with that, we recommend hiring professionals like Greg Tilley Pressure Cleaning for the removal of oil stains, gum, skid marks, bird droppings, dirt and other difficult to remove substances and then top if off with some garage flooring solutions like an epoxy garage floor coating. Make sure as well to have a garage door repair if you notice your garage door is already sagging or takes ages to lift.
