Organising your garage

Your garage has the potential to be so much more than a place to store your car. From DIY to hobby space to boxes of family documents, your garage is the perfect place for whatever your house won’t hold. As it fills up, however, organising it can become a challenge.

Plan ahead

Any well-organised garage starts with a storage plan. Draw out a rough sketch map of the space, together with a list of the things you need to store. Don’t forget to leave space for people to move around the garage!

Start with a blank page

Just as your storage design starts with a blank piece of paper, your actual storage solution begins with an empty garage. Clear everything out of the garage. A cluttered drive may be demoralising, but the improved storage efficiency will be rewarding. You may even find that you don’t need all the things you’ve been keeping in your garage.

Plan creatively

A well-organised garage requires a certain amount of lateral thinking. Shelves and pegboards on the walls are very useful, but there’s more available use. If your garage has exposed rafters, consider attaching shelves or hanging storage bins to them. A section of pipe makes a good storage container for lumber, rope or other long, thin items.

Fit your storage to the purpose

Sooner or later, every garage winds up containing a storage unit with rows of tiny drawers, the sort of thing you might use to store different sizes of screw or washer. To many of us, it just seems like the sort of thing we ought to have — even if the only thing we’ve ever screwed together was a flat-pack coffee table. Going down to your local office or DIY shop and running wild in the aisles is surprisingly enjoyable, but it’s not the best way to organise your garage. As always, stick to the plan.