When you open your garage door and look around, are you instantly reminded of the TV show “Hoarders”? Don’t worry, you’re certainly not alone. When most households start accumulating too much clutter, their garages usually become like a magical box which hides everything to “deal with another day”. But looking at all the junk piled inside our garages, I think we know that another day never seems to happen. Something must be done about it.
Thankfully there is some good news. Simply by following the basic steps below you can declutter your garage and organise everything in no time at all. And once your garage is a clutter-free zone again, keeping everything neat and tidy is actually pretty easy! You’ll even be able to use it for things like storage, hobbies, a workshop, and maybe even *shock!* parking your car?
Get Everything Ready
Before you can start the process of decluttering your garage, you need to make sure you have everything you’re going to need. Here’s an inventory of supplies:
- Large Heavy-Duty Trash Bags
- A Decent Broom
- A Strong Vacuum Cleaner
- Any Shelving Or Hooks You Need
- Plastic Storage Boxes*
*Instead of using cardboard boxes for storage, you should seriously consider getting purpose-built storage bins. These plastic storage boxes are airtight to keep out moisture and pests, they’re much sturdier than cardboard, they’re designed to be stackable, and they can easily be labelled which makes it much easier to find things when you need them.
Depending on how much clutter there is, you should block off a whole weekend or at least one full day for decluttering and reorganizing your garage. It’s also a good idea to do a weather check the night before as heavy rain would make this job a lot more difficult.
Pull Everything Out
You need to find out what you have cluttered inside your garage, so the next step is pulling everything out of the garage space for sorting. The driveway or the backyard are both usually good places to put it all. If neither of these is possible for whatever reason, you’ll need to play a bit of Tetris by systematically moving everything around the garage while sorting, cleaning, and making room as you go.
Choose somewhere to start pulling everything out from, and work your way through from the outside while concentrating on creating floor space. This will also help you visualise the space for later when organising everything you keep.
When you’re removing things from your garage, start arranging everything in separate groups to help with sorting. The best way to do this is to put every single item into four zones as listed below:
- Keep
- Donate
- Recycle
- Rubbish
If you’re having difficulty making decisions about what to keep, try to be more practical than sentimental. A good rule of thumb for doing this is to get rid of anything in your garage which you either haven’t used in the last 12 months or haven’t found a use for at all. This will really help with speeding up the process by making decisions much easier.
Organise Everything You’re Keeping
Once everything is out and your garage is empty, it’s time to start organising your keep pile. Remember that how well everything is organised will affect how easy it will be to keep it that way. The most effective way of doing this is by developing a logical storage system based on different categories and creating specific zones for them. The zones below might help, but it will depend on what kind of stuff you have.
- Car supplies
- Sports equipment
- Tools
- Camping Gear
- Toys
- Other
Once you know what categories you have, you can start deciding how you should store it all. Make use of any vertical space by hanging things like garden tools and sports equipment on the walls. Anything that is used frequently needs to be stored close by for easy access, whereas rarely used items should be stored out of sight or on higher shelves. The most important thing here is that everything needs to have its own designated space to be stored inside your garage.
Get Rid of the Garage Junk
Now that everything in your keep pile is organised and safely stored away inside your garage, it’s time to deal with the other three piles. Start bagging or boxing up the rubbish pile, and then do the same with the donation and recycling piles. Then you have a couple of options here.
The first option is to take the donations to local charities, then take the recycling to your local centre, and then start making multiple trips taking everything else that’s leftover to the dump. All of this is exactly as much extra work as it sounds like.
The next option is also the easiest, which is to contact a professional rubbish removal company like Cheapest Load Of Rubbish to deal with everything for you. We will come to your home on the same day or whenever else suits you best, collect all three remaining piles, and then take everything where it all needs to go for you.
Just don’t go getting lazy now after all your hard work and dragging all three piles back into the garage to “deal with it later”. We already know how that ends, remember?
Final Thoughts
Once you’ve decluttered, cleaned, and organised your garage, remember to keep it that way with regular cleaning and following smart storage practices. But if it ever does become an overwhelming problem again, you now know what to do about it. And if you need rubbish removal in Sydney, you know you can count on Cheapest Load Of Rubbish.
