How to Keep Your Garage Clean Forever!

Maintaining an orderly garage

Keeping your home tidy and organized requires a lot of effort. A clean garage is often the last priority on your list of household chores because it’s usually the part of the home that’s occupied the least. Nonetheless, there’s no reason to clutter your car hold and allow it to become a danger zone.

In fact, a messy garage may be a peril for you and your family due to fire hazards, tripping over objects and other risks. The following tips show you the basics of how to keep your garage clean and tidy.

Plan of action

If your garage resembles a catastrophe from a disaster movie, the first step you should take is sketching out a plan of action to create order from chaos. Before making these decisions, it’s best to have the rest of your home organized to determine the items that should be tucked into the garage.

Once you’ve determined the size of the job, sort all of the clutter into groups according to type and potential location of storage. Create space by removing larger objects, such as a tool storage bench, a motorcycle or a lawnmower.

After arranging everything into sorted piles and clearing as much space as possible, you’re prepared to take the next step.

Making tough decisions

There’s a good chance that your garage is cluttered because you didn’t take the time to decide if the things in your garage deserve to take up space at all. Occasionally, it’s difficult to determine if you should let go of an item that has value. Most of the time, the decision to keep or toss something is fairly straightforward. As a rule of thumb, it’s safe to say that if you forgot that the object was in your garage to begin with, you should probably get rid of it immediately.

Now that you’ve reduced the overall level of clutter in the garage, it’s time to choose how you will organize storage to optimize the available space. Storing as much as possible on the wall or ceiling frees up the greatest amount of floor space. Hanging bikes, large power tools and other items on hooks makes them easily accessible. For the rest, storage shelves attached to the wall should collect smaller items, preventing them from becoming scattered. This not only saves space but the time spent rifling through a haystack of garbage to find a tiny object. Rent a storage locker if you have a lot of items you cannot part with that do not fit in your garage.

When hanging items, it’s important to be sure that the wall or ceiling is capable of bearing the load you place on the surface. If your garage is thinly constructed, hanging heavy objects may cause the wall or ceiling to crumble without warning, representing a significant hazard for you and your family.

Aftercare and maintenance

After you’ve tamed the chaos of your garage, it’s important to stick to a regular routine of maintenance and reorganization that ensures you never deal with a cleaning catastrophe again. At the bare minimum, you should sweep or vacuum the floor on a weekly basis. Sweeping and vacuuming regularly forces you to clear the garage floor of items that you used to accumulate before changing your habits.

Every couple of months, go through the entire garage to check on the condition of your organization efforts. Keep an eye out for shelves that appear to be weakening and any other problems that appear to be manifesting. Perform a deep clean by wiping down surfaces and getting rid of dust and grime in hard to reach places. Clean and lubricate moving parts, like door hinges, chains on garage door openers and other hardware.

If you store fuel, noxious chemicals or paint in your garage, check to make sure the containers aren’t compromised, which risks releasing dangerous chemicals into an enclosed space.

The Home Safety Council recently polled 502 homeowners, including their opinions about their garage. Surprisingly, nearly 60% of all respondents admitted that they are not concerned about garage safety, which is ironic considering that at least 33% of those surveyed revealed that they suffered an injury in their garage.

Physical injury and feeling mortified about the clutter in your garage is completely unnecessary and requires very little time to correct. The next time you’re about to toss 90 rolls of toilet paper you bought from a wholesaler into the dark corner in the back of your garage, take a moment to think about the small investment of time and effort it takes to properly organize and clean the space up on a permanent basis.