Cleaning The Garage

Well, it's a dirty job; but somebody's got to do it. If you can't get the car into the garage because you have too much junk piled in there, it's time to get busy. The purpose of a garage is to house your vehicle, it's not the junk-overflow room for your home.

Recently, I did an organizing job where I helped the client re-organize her home office. We worked away on the office and made good headway, then we went out to get some storage boxes from her garage.

You could hardly see the car for all the stuff that was stored over and around it. I have no idea how she even got into the car as there was so little room to open the door.

I mentioned that it wouldn't take much to get the garage in shape and we pencilled that in for our next project.

Here are some tips to help your with own garage cleaning project.

Planning to hold a garage sale is a great motivator. Plan your sale for two weeks away and you'll have an urgent reason to get everything all sorted out and cleaned.

Enlist the help of the whole family or a couple of friends because cleaning a garage involves a lot of climbing, bending and stretching. It's really good if you have a tall husband or six foot kids to reach into those rafters where you've stored things you haven't seen in years.

Determine what you are going to be storing in the garage and decide what equipment you may need to purchase or adapt for future storage. Do you need to get steel shelving, pegboard, or plastic storage containers? You may need hooks or other hardware supplies. Take some time to decide what you are going to do with the things that do need to remain in the garage, and get those supplies before you start cleaning.

I find it easier to sort one section at a time. For instance in my client's garage, we'll take out the car. Remove all obvious garbage and then sort through what's left to see if it needs to be repaired, recyled, thrown out or given away. We'll do this section-by-section until we're done.

We'll dispose of items that are no longer wanted, arrange to have reusuable items picked up for recyling and have someone haul away and deliver the things to be given away. I try to get one of my helpers to do this as we work so we don't have piles of things awaiting disposal or transport at the end of the sorting and cleaning of the day. Once the excess is cleared out and taken away, it is amazing how energizing this is for the garage owner.

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