How to organize your garage and storage room

Where to start

Everything out. It’s the first step, and it sounds like overkill, but organizing a garage a little at a time, tidying around what’s already there, is how it ends up back the way it was two months later.

With everything in plain sight, sort it into four piles:

• stays — you use it and it needs to be close at hand;
• stored — you rarely use it, so it can go in a bin;
• goes — give it away, sell it or throw it out;
• doesn’t belong here — it lives in another room of the house.

The third pile is usually bigger than you expect. That’s what makes room, not new shelves — which is also why you can organize a garage on a budget.

Organize your garage by zones

Once you’ve seen what stays, divide the garage into zones by use, not by category:

• by the door, what comes and goes every day — bags, strollers, sports gear;
• on one wall, tools and DIY;
• up high and at the back, what you use once a year — holiday decorations, camping gear, out-of-season clothes;
• on the floor, as little as possible. A clear floor is what makes a garage look organized.

How to organize garage tools

The tools you actually use go out in the open, on a wall: a pegboard or a rail with hooks, and every tool with its own spot. It works even in a garage without shelves. If you trace the outline of each tool on the pegboard, you can see at a glance what’s missing.

The rest — drill bits, screws, loose parts, the things that only come out for one project a year — goes in small bins, ideally matching and clear, lined up on a shelf. One bin per kind of thing, with what’s in it written on the outside.

Organization ideas and hacks for a small garage

• Go up. Shelves to the ceiling, and ceiling hooks for bikes and folding chairs.
• The walls are storage. Narrow shelving, rails, hooks.
• Matching bins that stack. A stack of same-size bins takes up half the space of mismatched ones.
• A door is a shelf. The inside of a cabinet door holds hooks and baskets.
• Nothing on the floor that doesn’t have wheels.

Which storage bins to use

For the garage and the storage room, plastic bins with lids: they stand up to damp and dust, they stack, and they last for years. Cardboard boxes are fine for a move; left in storage, they go soft.

Pick one or two sizes and stick with them. Bins that match fit the same shelves and can swap places without any trouble — and that’s most of how you organize garage shelves.

Then label each storage bin on the side that faces out: a number and what’s inside, big enough to read from where you stand. Plastic takes a marker or a sticker; on a fabric bin, a tag tied to the handle does the job.

How to organize a storage room

A storage room — in the basement of your building, or a spare room at home — is a garage without the big door: what goes in, stays. The rule is the same, with one extra thing to watch. Since you rarely go in there, what matters is knowing what’s in it without going there.

A closed box at the back of the storage room is a forgotten box. Number the boxes, make a list of what’s in each one and keep it where you can check it without making the trip — in a notebook in the house, or on your phone.

What keeps an organized garage organized

Knowing where everything is. When you don’t know, you search; when you search, you move things out of place; and two months later the garage is the way it was. With a readable label on every box and a list of what each one holds, whatever comes out goes back where it came from. That’s the whole trick.