by Katherine Macey
Once you have decided what you want to use your garage for, you may find there are items that need to be removed from the garage. If you are keeping them, find a new home for them that makes sense. If you are not keeping them, remember to reuse and recycle.
If you are not going to reuse the items, allow other people to reuse by selling items or giving them away. Options for selling items include:
-
Yard Sale
- Craigslist
- eBay – advice from a local eBay seller, Amy Weintraub of Shop It LA , suggests only selling something on eBay if it is worth over $100 – otherwise you spend a lot of time posting on line, packaging and posting the items for not much return.
- Wertz Brothers– buy high end furniture (located in Santa Monica)
Consider donating directly to charities in your area, but give them a call first to find out if they need them. Some great places to donate to in the Los Angeles area are:
- Baby2Baby, collects and redistributes gently used baby and young children’s items
- Beyond Shelter, accepts all manner of in kind donations to assit the homeless in transitioning to homes.
- LA Shares, redistributes working electronic goods to schools and other non-profit agencies in the area.
- PATH, People Assisting The Homeless
- Soles4Souls, reusing your shoes that you don’t wear any more.
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by Katherine Macey
The first thing to do when organizing your garage, or any space for that matter, is to decide what you want to use the space for. This might depend on how large the space is. If you have room for 3 cars, but only have 2 cars, of course you will want to use that extra space for something.
The garage used to be the place to park your car, but more and more frequently, the car is being parked in the driveway and the garage has just essentially become another room of the house. They are turned into playrooms, entertainment rooms, exercise rooms, or just a place for storage. Some people use their garage for a hybrid of uses – parking their car, storage and a kids craft area for instance.
However you use your garage, you do want it to be functional and not just a catch-all area for stuff you can’t decide what to do with or will never actually use. All too often, it becomes a mess of old furniture, boxes of who know’s what, children’s toys, and extra supplies. The trouble with that is, if it is such a mess, or has so much stuff in it, the useful things get overshadowed and forgotten.
Typical uses:
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Parking your car
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Storing seasonal decorations
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Storing gardening supplies
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Storing household repair items and tools
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Archiving files
Items to avoid storing outside:
- Vinyl records
- Video cassette tapes
- Other electronic media
- Photos
- Clothes
- Bedding
- Wine
Anything that will be affected by damp or large temperature changes really should be stored in the house.
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by Katherine Macey
Summer time is a great time to spend outdoors. There’s the beach, sports, walks in the mountains, or gardening in your back yard. And probably most of the gear you need for your summer outdoor activities is stored in the garage. Why not make it easy to access so you spend as little time there as possible and more time out doing the activities you want to do?
Here are 6 tips to help organize your belongings in the garage.
- Keep all the things you use for one activity together
- It’s much faster to get out the door when all your gear for an activity is together. Let’s take going camping. It used to take us a couple of hours to get everything together from various places around the house and garage. Now we can have our car packed with all our camping gear for a weekend in about 20 minutes. We all have “camping clothes” that we can quickly throw in a bag. We have a separate box that we keep all our camping cutlery, dishes and kitchen supplies in that stays in the garage ready to go. All our camping gear is in one section of shelving within the garage, so we literally just have to back up our car and load everything straight in.
- Use the vertical space in your garage effectively
- Use cabinets, shelving and overhead racks if you have the vertical space.
- Tackle a big garage organizing project in stages
- If your garage has been a dumping ground for some time, you may need to approach the garage in stages. Perhaps tackle one wall first, perhaps one corner, or perhaps the gear for one activity that you do. Organize the items that you use most often first. That way, you’ll be able to spend more time doing your favorite activities, rather than organizing (which I know is one of OUR favorite activities, but probably not yours!)
