Simply Done: Decluttered & Organized Garage

Jan 31

Should be more than clear by now, but just in case it isn’t – garages are my favorite residential space to declutter and organize. It was only fitting that we kicked off 2020 with the most incredible garage. Our first project of the year after the break and what a transformation!

My team and I spent 8 hours decluttering and organizing this large 3 car garage – in freezing cold temps – but were thrilled with the outcome. The incredibly sweet mom and homeowner was even more excited.

Over the years I’ve talked quite a bit about garages – here’s an informative post I shared back in July 2015 with top tips for getting your own garage organized. A garage is just one of those spaces that is easy to neglect. It’s an easy place to drop items for donation with the hopes you’ll actually make it to the donation center. It’s the space where items you’re questioning about keeping go to hang out for a while. For many families, the garage is your point of entry so anything you would typically see in your front door entry can be found here too.

This family of 5 is busy. And after a full holiday season, they were ready to declutter all of 2019 (maybe a year or more before that as well) and head into 2020 with a beautifully clean, decluttered and organized garage.

BEFORE & AFTER

On first sight during the consult, I saw she had great bones already. She has beautiful and very tall, spacious custom cabinets on one wall. She also had 7 overhead shelving racks – these are an incredible use of space and a great place to tuck away items used only 1x per year. Or memory items you don’t want sitting in prime real estate. Honestly, all this garage needed was a solid decluttering session and my space planning to make it all come together.

Cabinets before…

And here they are after…LOVE!…

It’s not always necessary to have bins and special containers inside cabinets. The doors keep items safe and dust-free…and you can always add shelves to give you more functional space. In the 2 right cabinets we carved out room for her bulk store items – paper towels, kleenex, cleaning products, extra food and drinks. Up top we tucked away entertaining pieces she doesn’t use very often.

In the 2 left cabinets we created a zone for her oversized Christmas decorations…

She also had some items that were in their original packaging – better to keep these as is as opposed to unboxing and putting into bins.

Her bins of Christmas decor and other holidays were sitting on the ground waiting to go into the overhead racks…

These were organized for max space and then I spaced them out beautifully on 1 of the overhead racks…

No matter where you’re located, there is a company to install these. You can purchase the racks from Costco or a home improvement store (here)…and then hire a handyman to install. For my local friends, am happy to refer you to the companies I’ve had great experience with. They show up to quote you with material on the truck…if you’re ready to go, they install the racks same day. Pretty fricking cool!

These racks are set at a height custom to the available space you have.

( overhead shelving )

I think the entire garage was a home run, but this was by far the biggest transformation of the day. This is one stall of the garage off set from the main garage…

Or should I say “was”…

Check it out now…

Honestly, this wasn’t simply emptying everything out and taking an after photo. There was a solid 2 or more hours of tough decisions being made by this amazing homeowner. What to keep? What to sell? What to donate? We emptied everything, categorized and asked some serious questions in order to get to this point. What remained was either stored away appropriately with its category – for example, the Christmas wreaths moving to the overhead racks – or it was placed on the overhead shelving. She dug in and did the hard work and was very proud at the end of the day.

Incredible work on her part!

Have you taken on a big organizing project this year? Would love to hear about it!

Hope you guys are having a great week – hard to believe it’s the LAST DAY of January!!! February here we come!

Back soon guys!

xx,

Sam

comments +

  1. Yes, this is a late comment…I’m catching up on missed blog posts from you (Gmail has a way to filter. It’s “label:unread” without the quotation marks.

    Anyway, I’m curious as to why the alcohol is stored in a garage. Here in Arizona it’s not a good idea. We can’t even store candles in the garage! Well, we CAN, but they tend to melt into strange shapes!

    That’s all.

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