Step One: remove everything and I mean everything from the garage. We spent the first 30 minutes hauling every item in the garage out into the driveway and organizing the items into related piles.
Step Two: clean the empty garage. Shop vac is recommended. We vacuumed up all dirt, dead bugs, spider webs and other miscellaneous mess including hitting up the shelves throughout the garage.
Step Three: demo. Some of the shelves in the garage were not set far enough apart to be able to place items in them so...a hammer and some muscle and we knocked a few out to make room.
Step Four: organize and chuck. We went through everything we had moved to the drive way to determine keeping or throwing away and then organizing with other like items so we can store efficiently and find things when we need them. We ended up with a huge trash pile, a small donate pile and a smaller pile of well organized keep things.
Step Five: reload. After everything was organized and cleaned it was time to reload the garage. We started with the shelves and then we tested things out in different spots to find the best location dependent upon how often we used it and if it fit.
Step Six: celebratory beer. Step back, take a sip and revel in the newly organized garage!!
Whew! That makes me tired again just writing this post. What I thought would be 2 hours turned into a 5 hour project but it was worth it. Now we just have to keep it that way.
