Once your new garage cabinets are installed and ready to go, it will be up to you to organize where your things will go within them. This may sound like an easy task, but it can actually come with some surprisingly stumping challenges; after all, you want to pick the spot where you can find each tool, decoration, and part you’re looking for, when you’re looking for it.

Checklist-Worthy Garage Organization Tips

While this may not seem like something you would struggle with, you may find yourself surprised by how difficult it can be to find a forever home for your toys. Once you see how much storage you have to fill in your garage cabinets, just cramming things in wherever they’ll fit is no longer a viable strategy. So, to overcome the mountain of trial and error that can come with an unplanned or gradual cabinet organization, read on for some helpful planning tips!

Gather The Goods

First things first, you need to dig out everything you’re looking to store in your cabinets and get it into position. We recommend using the garage floor or driveway as a sort of showroom, where you can plainly see everything that needs to find a home. Once you’re able to see everything that needs to find a place inside your cabinets, you’ll find that it is much easier to assign everything a home. By not doing this, you’ll slowly find things that also need to go into your garage cabinets that you just can’t believe you forgot and absolutely need to get to on a regular basis – queue the re-arranging and frustration that simply seeing everything you’ll need at the same time could avoid.

Take Low-Hanging Fruit

If anything screams at you as obvious, place it in it’s home first. For instance, if your garage cabinets features a tall, shelfless cabinet, you can place all of your brooms, mops, and other tall objects inside to claim the space and get them out of the way. Other, somewhat less obvious, things include tools that border your most obvious workspaces; for instance, your hobbying tools that will be picked up and set down often should go in a drawer just under the countertop near where you’ll do most of the work, so put them there first!

Map Out Roles

Once you start assigning the low-hanging fruit, you’ll begin to assign drawers, shelves, and whole cabinets roles, as in what they will primarily serve. You’ll begin to sequester some things by the type of garage storage and organization makes the most sense. For instance, your general carpentry tools don’t need to intermingle with power tools, and neither needs to intermingle with your automobile tools. Other ways to sort out roles could be by person; you can keep the kiddos toys low and away from where cabinet doors can hit cars when open and closed repeatedly, while the more dangerous tools and chemicals can stay up and out of reach or in locking cabinets.

Work Outward

Once you have a few solid roles assigned and begin placing things in their general zones, you should begin working outward. Often, people start with the areas they will use the most (typically ends up being wherever the most work space is), which make this area the best starting point to spread things out from there. By assigning the obvious things to their home, then the most necessary things closest to where you’ll spend the most time, everything else finds it own homes in between. Think of it as an eruption of garage organization or keeping your most necessary things close-at-hand; in any case, you’ll soon have momentum rolling and find that your garage floor is quickly becoming emptied as everything gets sorted into corresponding cabinets and drawers.

Find Opportunities For Micro-Organization

If you’re left with a bunch of drawers and shelves that hold what they need to, but don’t do a particularly great job of it, then it’s time to start looking at some mini organization system. Whether you opt for Mason Jars, washed out mayo jars, kitchen and pantry organizers, or even store-bought tool and parts holders, now is the time to start looking at what you need and what you could use and begin to make sense out of your hodge-podge of storage options left over from your pre-cabinet garage – including sorting out that coffee can full of miscellaneous nails and screws. For now, you can keep things in whatever you can find wherever they will eventually go, but making a list of what you need solutions for can be handy, as you’ll be able to slowly accumulate them as you find things that’ll work when you’re out and about anyway.