Spring Cleaning the Garage (gasp)

Spring is the ideal time to clean out the 'ol garage. It's not too hot yet and most people are in a "it's time to be more organized" sort of mood. I know spring always signifies a new beginning for myself.

Garages can be tricky I found out. The house is generally the woman's domain but the garage? Well that's man land and if your man is like mine then he typically doesn't like his things to be touched! Our garage is a three car one and we generally use one half for the car and kid stuff and the other smaller side is my husband's work area.

Last year I took on the kid half:

Messy kid side

The only things that were contained were the Holiday decorations. Everything else was just thrown on the shelves, threatening to topple over at any given moment.

Clean kid side

After clearing out the things I didn't need, I organized everything else by category, designating the bottom shelf for kid items, ie bike gear, sand toys, chalk and bubbles, etc. I cleared out the space under the shelves so I could scoot all the strollers and bikes underneath it. My kids never put them back in the right way but hey, they're kids. I deal with it. :) Since this project was somewhat impromptu the bins don't all match because a lot of them were ones I had in the house already. A garage doesn't have to be pretty but it does need to be functional!

This year I decided to tackle my husband's half of the garage. I'm so brave! Here's what his half looked like:

Messy left side

 Nothing in a bin, virtually nothing placed with like objects, garbage, unwanted items, and wanted items all mish-mashed together.

Messy right side

The other side wasn't any better. We even had the box for a Christmas tree we don't have anymore stored up on the top shelf! Why? I have no idea...

Fearless girl that I am, I attempted the impossible and carefully started going through my husband's things until I could go no further. When my husband came and saw all the progress I had made on my own I was able to convince him to help me organize the rest of it into manageable piles. I couldn't have finished it on my own because I'm a girl. I had no idea which boxes of screws belonged together etc.

Clean left side

Finally after two days, a trip to the dumpster, and a trip to D.I., we were able to put all the piles into bins of their own. I bought the bins at the dollar store. They had 17 of them that day and I bought them all. Finally all the like items are together and my husband will be able to see exactly what he has before he goes out and buys the same thing. And because all the bins are labeled I can find what I'm looking for when I go in there too, sort-of. ;)

Clean right side

We got rid of so much stuff that the right side has space to spare. A good organizer always leaves room to grow after all. :) Of the 17 baskets I used 16 of them. I lucked out on that one for sure! During the cleaning out process I discovered that my husband had 4 full jugs of windshield cleaner, three unopened packages of paint rollers, and about twelve half used containers of putty. Now that his garage is organized we'll save money too!

So that my friends is how I conquered the man cave AKA garage. I lived to tell the tale. Show this post to your husbands... maybe they'll be inspired to do the same.

Hey, a wife can always dream, right? ;)

Walk Through Your Walk-in Again

Little helpers can also contribute to closet chaos too!

Having a walk-in closet can be a blessing. There's all the room you need to store your clothes and anything else. It can also be a curse. Why? Because it's a whole other room that has to be kept organized in order to function at its optimal level in order to keep you functioning at your optimal level!

I have a walk-in closet and it is a blessing to me. I am a girl who loves storage after all! However, there are some things that have always bothered me about my closet. For one thing it is essentially a long hallway type closet. It has some built-in shelves but they aren't very functional and there's no drawers or places to keep shoes. All these things can of course be fixed with some custom closet solutions but like my mom always says, "When you have the time for a home-improvement project, you don't have the money. When you have the money, you don't have the time." And so it goes with my closet. :)

Here are some of the built-ins in my closet where I keep my winter sweaters. FYI you should never hang sweaters because it makes them get misshapen and stretched out. Always fold them instead! Well that's what I was trying to do but as you can see it wasn't working very well. All the piles kept ending up falling over as I searched for a particular sweater. And as the bottom two shelves were just one long shelf it made the piles even harder to keep neat.

Martha Stewart to the rescue! Fortunately for me she has a whole line of organization remedies at Home Depot and they come in awesome colors. Who knew you can have a color scheme in the closet, right? My "piles" of clothes were already separated by color and so I chose to to continue on with that tactic and put each color in its own drawer. Over board? I think not! It looks so neat and clean now. I love it!

I didn't have enough drawer space in my dresser for my intimates so I had been storing them in bins and shoe boxes that were always unorganized and hard to find. Not any more! I used an old book shelf of my kids' that I bought brand new at Wal-Mart (several years ago) for less than $20. And thanks to some cute little baskets from the dollar store, my panty hose, bathing suits, sports bras, slips, and bras are all together again!

In another built-in I piled my jeans as neatly as I could and separated them by category as well; lights, darks, skinnies, etc. Another recycled bookshelf houses my out of season shoes.

Finally, every good walk-in closet has a hamper inside it. Not for your dirty clothes but for the ones you no longer need or want. Once the hamper is full, then you know it's time for a trip to Goodwill.

A bona fide California Closet may still be in my future someday but for now I am happy with how my closet is functioning. It's a breath of fresh air to enter it in the morning and be able to find what I need without a lot of hectic searching. What I love the most is none of these solutions cost me a lot of money.

Who doesn't love that?!?