If your garage is a mess, or you just want to figure out How to Organize Your Garage on a Tight Budget, you’ve come to the right place.
Garages are oftentimes neglected and unattended by owners that use it as an attic or an extended storage room of sorts. Without a good decoration plan, it becomes near impossible to get through the mess without accidentally toppling over a few things.
Thankfully, there are a few philosophies to embrace so your garage organization gets a much-needed uplift. You too can finally reclaim your garage space and be much more productive. We have listed out a few tips for approaching your garage cleanup, and some budget-friendly DIYs and ideas you can use to turn your garage into a point of pride.
Philosophy: Organization First
Take the weekend or even an entire week for this. Planning out your organizational efforts would go a long way in actualizing what you dream your garage to be. It’s all possible; you just need to have a proper lay of the land before you actually get into any reconfiguration.
Take everything out and get a feel of how much space you have and how to fit the items in there. Take this time to also clean out your garage so you put your stuff back in a cleaner space.
The rest of this article is meant to give you a sense of utilizing empty space and how best to fit your things there.
Philosophy: Discarding
Discard what you don’t need! Better yet, donate it. For daily use items that you haven’t used in 6 months, you can consider donating them. A year for seasonal items that you haven’t used. If you can predict usage of anything in the coming few months, keep them shelved and saved efficiently using the next few tips.
Sort smaller items in separate bins and discard entire bins that you find no use of. That way you also save up on time to organize your smaller items. Label the bins as necessary.
Philosophy: Bulk Ordering
1/4 inch screws, nails, pallets, these are all items that you can never seem to find when you need them. To save up a bunch of money (and time) you can order these items in bulk or on sale. This eliminates a lot of hassle down the line, and it’s a good idea to club similar items together for storage. Bulk ordering helps you save up on a lot of extra functionality right when you need it most.
Embrace Verticality
Verticality means using all that empty storage space on the walls. If you have a habit of placing everything in your garage on floors or empty surfaces, adding a few extra hooks and holders to your wall might transform your filled up garage into a spacious productivity den.
It’s much better to store things on a wall compared to wasting floor space. All your vipers, rakes and power tools can fit very nicely on snug wall holders. If you’ve applied the philosophy of discarding here, your walls can occupy only the things you regularly use – this saves your walls from being overcrowded.
Install a pegboard system so that you can hook up tools easily. This solution provides inexpensive shelving solutions where you can place all your bins and extra equipment like tapes and wrenches and power tools.
Shelving and Cabinets
Have enough shelving for all your bins and smaller storage. If you have hazardous liquids or other materials that could be possible spillage issues, having a separate cabinet also helps. Shelves are also an excellent way to keep all your toolboxes out of the reach of your pets and children.
Overhead shelves can act as a buffer for your items that you have no more use of. You can either build your own cabinets and shelving (if you’re a professional at this) or buy some inexpensive shelving solutions from the market to save time.
Repurposed Furniture
This tip is for anyone who has old office furniture lying about in their house. You can reuse the furniture to create bins and shelving racks.
Take the drawers out of a filing cabinet and place the emptied cabinet sideways on the floor. This way, you get both portable bins and a storage rack for your tools.
Repurposing old furniture is a great way to minimize losses. Reuse the pieces of furniture you don’t need for something more productive. If it helps you reclaim more space in your garage and offers you extra storage, you should totally go for it!
Hooks and Hangers
Take an inventory of how many tools you have. Get as many hooks and hangers as required for your pegboard/wall. If you just hang what you need, it’s surprising how much space you can save. It also serves the dual purpose of being easily accessible and visible right when you want something.
To create easy wall hangers for your sawblades, just take a few metal pie plates and cut them in half. Screw them into your wall. Different sizes of hangers for saw blades of all different sizes!
You can also opt for magnetic wall hangers. You can just plop your tools on these whenever you want to quickly place something back on the rack or take something out.
Some heavy-duty hooks and hangers can also lift up your bicycles and heavier equipment. As a result, this saves you even more floor space.
Using wall hangers and keeping items off the floor also helps in case your garage ever faces flooding or leakage of any kind.
Coloring and Lighting
If you’ve got a few cans of paint lying around, or if you’ve got the cash to get it done, you could also opt to paint your floor and walls. You would be surprised how much of a difference it makes. Painting your floor and walls gives the feeling of more space.
If you’ve also got the budget, invest in some decent lighting solution. Overhead LED lighting seems like the way to go. Good lighting in the garage gives you proper illumination when you’re working on a project. Overhead lighting enables you to productively focus on the task at hand. No more struggling with shadows dropping all over the place!
Car Safety
If you’ve previously got scratches on your paint driving into the garage, an easy way to buff out the walls would be reusing an old carpet and sticking it up on your walls. Whenever you enter or exit from your car, the carpet acts as padding that prevents any scratches or dents on your paint job.
Conclusion
If you want to redo your garage, you should just get started right away. Decluttering is also good for stress, and you’ll want to hang around in your garage more often if it was clean. If you’ve got any organizational ideas that you would like to share with the rest of our readers, leave your comments down below!