Organizing Your Garage with Boxes

My wife and I made a big change in our life.  It was a change of location and a change in how we lived.  Our entire married life we lived in apartments and we have not had to be responsible for taking care of the place we lived.  But we found a home that needed lots of work in the best neighborhood in the State.  The price was in our range due to the home and we decided to purchase it and fix it up.  This was a massive task for us and it ended up being a big mess.  But we learned many things through this whole process and it turns out that working on your home in winter is a hard thing. 

 

What we found was that working in winter made it really hard.  We would have to fix a room and all the things in that room needed to be moved to another room.  Then we were able to work on it but when multiple rooms were involved the home became so cluttered that we struggled to work.  Our garage filled completely up and that was at the time our only place to work.  At the end of the winter, we finally fixed the majority of the house but the garage was so full that it was not useable for anything.  It was cram-packed with tools and leftover products that we had used to fix up the home.  It was really sad to have an entire section of our home to be worthless.  So we decided we had to do something.

 

The main issue was that buying shelves or making shelves was out of the question. This is because it was simply too expensive and we were out of money that we could spend.  If anything went wrong with the home we were honestly in trouble.  So we decided that there had to be an option.  There were too many tools to get destroyed if we left it all out and we didn't want to waste anything. This is where we decided to go outside the box.  But in reality, we were not going to far outside the box because most attics are stored this way.  We decided to organize with all the cardboard boxes that we had stored away from the move. 

 

The idea was to store things vertically and create our own storage system.  It was based on the idea of usage.  We wanted the most used items to be stacked up on top.  So we labeled each box and numbered them from one to 5 based on how high we could stack the boxes in the garage.  So we put the most used tools and products on the top with box number five and we went piece by piece until we could make our first stack in the garage.  It was really important, to be honest with how much use we would get out of it.  It took a lot of arguing back and forth but several hours later we had half of the garage clean.  By the time we were done, we had cardboard boxes filling 1/4 of the garage and 3/4 of the garage that is totally free and clear.  It was a wonderful way to organize our garage for free. The system worked well and we ended up getting one car in there.