It’s time to reclaim one of the most underrated spaces in your house: the garage!

Long considered a dumping ground for seasonal decorations, boxes of long-forgotten toys and awards, and dusty, rusty goods you might but probably won’t use again, your garage can actually be one of the most useful parts of your home.

Many people have stuffed their garage so full of junk that it can’t even serve its primary purpose: housing your car.

This needs to change! According to the owner of Precision Garage Door, keeping your car behind the security of a closed garage door is critical to protecting it from theft, weathering, damage from other cars, and fallen tree branches or power lines, which happen a lot more often than you’d think!

Aside from its obvious function, garages can also be great work spaces if organized properly.

Having easy access to your tools, abundant space, and a floor and walls that you can dirty up with wood chippings and paint makes for the perfect studio for your DIY projects.

Except you don’t have to pay $400 a month for this studio, you just have to do a little cleaning.

Now, you don’t have to get rid of everything. Garages can actually be a great place to store your belongings.

They need to be clean enough to fit your car or your latest home project, but they also need to be organized in order to serve as an effective storage space.

A storage space doesn’t do anyone any good if it’s filled with things you don’t use or so cluttered that you can’t even find or get something when you need it.

Garage organizing is perhaps one of the most daunting home tasks, but it doesn’t need to be!

Follow this easy, step-by-step process and your garage will be de-cluttered and multi-purpose in no time.

1 – Schedule in your garage cleaning time. Pick a day when you have some extra time to start, usually a weekend, and schedule in at least 5 hours to do nothing but get started on organizing your garage.

2 – Get rid of stuff! Go through your belongings and make three piles: keep, donate, trash. Your donate pile should be the biggest, and your keep pile should be the smallest.

If you think you need something, try to remember the last time you used it. Don’t hoard! Get some people to help you with this task, and try to find people who will encourage you to let go of things.

3 – Once you’ve pared down to only the essentials, place them in piles based on categories.

These will vary depending on what you own and how you want to use your garage, but one helpful method for categorizing belongings in storage is to order them based on how frequently you use them.

Separate items you use regularly, such as tools, from items you use once in a while, such as recreational equipment, and items you use once a year, such as holiday decorations.

4 – Now thing vertical. In order to create space, you will want to store the items you have left vertically and use as little floor space as possible.

If you don’t already have them, install shelving systems and purchase storage bins.

When storing items, start with those that you use with the least frequency, and store them in the hardest to reach places, such as top shelves.

Store your most frequently used items on an eye-level shelf or above your work area.

5 – Install pegs and pegboards to hang items such as bicycles, recreational equipment, tools, and gardening equipment.

With a little handy work, you can even mount smaller recycling bins to the walls to maximize floor space.

Now that your garage is clean, organized, and usable, make sure it doesn’t get cluttered again! Don’t keep things you don’t use, and regularly get rid of belongings you haven’t touched in over a year.

Finally, don’t underestimate the value of a clean, organized garage! The next time you think about throwing junk into the garage and forgetting about it, remember how nice it is to be able to park your car in a secured space and have a place to work on your projects.

The post Spring Cleaning How to Completely Clean and Organize Your Garage appeared first on Synergistic Mind.