Organizing the Garage - A Little at a Time, Part 4 - Before and After Pics

   
I'm sorry it has taken me so long to finish up this garage series. We have been helping a new foster daughter settle in and we've been helping our high school graduate move out. Unfortunately, the place she was going to move into did not come through on their promises, so we helped her move back in yesterday! Life is like that sometimes, isn't it? Now onto our garage ...

Now that you've sorted your items into your functional areas, you'll want to put like things together. After this step, it's time to evaluate storage options. Until you know how many like items you have, you don't know what you'll need to store them. 

Once you have put your like things together, you can look into hiring someone to install garage storage units; you can put in a do-it-yourself system; you can use what you have; or you can do a combination of the above. We chose to use what we have on hand.

For example, in the tool area, we chose to put all our screwdrivers together, all our wrenches, etc. In our stacking drawers, one is for batteries, one for adhesives, and a couple for miscellaneous items.

You may want to have a box with small drawers for nails, screws, nuts, bolts and such. However, if you only have a couple of nails, you wouldn't need a box with multiple drawers. You may want to have a peg board to hang tools you use most often.




 
Because we have up to four foster daughters, we have multiples of snow shovels and rakes. To accommodate these, we have a strip that goes the entire length of the garage wall and another half-strip that goes below the other one. Tools snap into the tool-holders on the strips.

We have built-in shelves to house long-term storage belonging to our children, sleds, and other items.

Metal shelves serve as our toy and sports storage. We also keep some of these in a plastic container should we want to take them on a picnic.

 
An old cupboard has become our gardening center. 








And we have some locked cupboards for gas for the mower and other dangerous items.




So there's our garage project. Here are the before and after pictures - before pics on the left; after pics on the right.

More on garages:

Organizing the Garage - A Little at a Time, Part 1

Organizing the Garage - A Little at a Time, Part 2

Organizing the Garage - A Little at a Time, Part 3