Trading Tips: Ideas to Help Clear Your Garage of Clutter

Clutter in our living environments displeases most of us, and having too many items in a small garage significantly reduces the usefulness of this vehicle storage and maintenance space. Follow these four useful tips to gain control over a common household problem and get your home more useful to you again.

Trading Tips: Ideas to Help Clear Your Garage of Clutter

Donate Unwanted Items
As a preliminary tip, consider donating unwanted or excess personal items stored in the garage to charity. If your garage contains one or more vehicles you don’t use or don’t plan on keeping, offering them to a worthy cause like the Newgate School will bring you satisfaction and a nice charitable deduction during tax season. Many nonprofits appreciate auto donations and if the organization can’t utilize the vehicle, the charity can then raise funds by selling it.

Develop a Master Plan
Many households approach reducing garage clutter by developing a written plan for its location. For instance, you might designate this area as the site to primarily maintain vehicles and store specific automotive tools. Forcing yourself to map out each section of the garage on paper allows attention to focus specifically on details. You might decide you’ve allocated too significant a task to too little square footage for instance. In that situation, think about eventually either enlarging the garage, or consigning certain storage functions to other locations.

Use Lists
After you’ve determined the specific items to place in the garage, you’ll save time by listing all of the belongings you want to keep on a written roster in a notebook. You can assess the type of storage space you’ll require, if any, by examining this list in detail. Try and rank items according to frequency of use, and situate the belongings you utilize most often within easy reach.

Invest in Specialized Storage
Investing in specialized garage storage compartments, such as a peg board wall posters with hooks, additional built-in shelving, cabinets, standalone shelving, or garage freezers provides a great way to add extra storage room for different items in the garage. If you still observe clutter after storing items, consider going through your list again to remove unessential belongings. Possibly a garage sale would solve this problem.

Removing clutter from the family garage offers big rewards. Not only does this process enhance the utility of this important location, it provides a more attractive and safer environment for maintaining household vehicles. If the residence ever reaches the real estate market, an attractive garage typically enhances the marketability of the property as well.