Your Complete Garage Declutter Checklist
The garage is the one space in a home that tends to become cluttered the most. This is because whenever you come across something in the house that doesn’t have a place to live, the default solution is to put it in the garage until later. But, of course, later rarely comes around, and the garage’s clutter problem only worsens.
Let’s put an end to that issue today! Read on for your complete garage declutter checklist. Here, we’ll offer practical steps to help you get out from under your cluttered garage and reclaim this space once and for all.
Of course, it’s possible that going through the decluttering process will reveal that you need to upgrade your garage to a new structure. If that is the case, Carport Kingdom is here to help. We offer high-quality metal garages backed by a warranty and engineer-certified installation. To get started, explore our Build & Price tool or contact our team if you have questions.
Start with a Trash Bag
The best place to start decluttering a garage is with a large garbage bag in hand. It’s a near certainty that you will find plenty of things you can throw away just by walking around the garage to cut down on clutter. It might take just a matter of minutes to have your bag mostly full, and you will have made a meaningful dent in the problem just like that.
At this point, don’t worry about making the hard decisions about things you might want to eliminate. Instead, for your first cleaning round, pick out the things you are sure you don’t like or need anymore.
Selling and Donating Unneeded Items
With the garbage out of the way, you can now sort through what is left and select things you are done using. A bit more thinking will be involved in this stage of the process, so take your time. With any luck, you’ll be able to pick out at least a few things you are comfortable getting rid of, and even more space in the garage will start to open up.
Once you’ve decided what can go, look into selling or donating those items. You might be surprised at what can find a new home rather than just taking it to the dump. Many neighborhoods have social pages where you can post things to sell or give away, and it’s often easy to find items a new home that way.
Take an Accurate Inventory
Now is the time to take inventory of what’s left in the garage. The pile that remains should all be things you want to keep, so the task shifts to finding a place for everything to live in an organized fashion. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down everything left in the garage.
Once you have an extensive list, you can start to group those things by items that should be stored together or need to be stored similarly. For instance, you’ll probably find plenty of stuff that can be stacked up in plastic totes. Having a master list will help you organize your mind and start to build a plan for how to put everything into place.
Find Storage Solutions
As mentioned above, some storage solutions will be obvious, like small items that can go into bins. But what are you going to do with some of the bigger things? Items like golf clubs, bicycles, and large power tools often cause storage issues. So your last task is to find suitable storage options for these more oversized or oddly-shaped items. Fortunately, if you have done a good job with the rest of your things, you’ll already feel much better about the state of the garage, even if it takes a bit more time to get the last items sorted out.
When the decluttering work in your garage is done, you should be able to take a step back, take a deep breath, and enjoy the feeling of being organized. The garage space will be far more useful and less stressful now that that clutter has been corralled. We wish you the best of luck with this project, and please feel free to reach out to Carport Kingdom if creating a new garage is on your agenda!