Situation:

This garage was used for watching tv, working on crafts, and an extra playroom. At the same time, it had to be used to store the usual garage items including holiday décor, extra entertaining supplies, etc.

Challenge:

In the beginning there was no storage in this garage, only some assorted furniture, TV and a desk. As with many garage conversions, this space had to accommodate many different types of activities and serve as a comfortable retreat /playroom for the two boys and a space for mom and sons to create craft projects and read.

Solution:

My client had wall-to-wall cabinets installed along the longest side of the garage without windows. The cabinets made it possible to create order with the deep freeze storage items like holiday décor and also made a place for sporting equipment and extra entertaining items to live while not in use.

I shifted furniture around to create zones for each type of activity. The desk was moved to the back wall so that all craft supplies were in the same zone with small table and chairs positioned for action.

The lateral file cabinet was moved next to the door into the house as this contained the permanent family records.

The large cube shelf was moved behind the couch to create division between storage and TV zone. All extra toys were grouped together ‘like with like’ and stored in baskets behind the couch. As the boys decided to play with different activities, they brought out one basket at a time and learned to put the first one away between activities to keep chaos at bay.

Situation: This garage had plenty of built-in storage but a mess was created when we decided to get rid of the off-site storage unit and consolidate everything into the garage. As with most organizing projects, there is usually temporary chaos before there is order.

Challenge: The back wall of this garage had built-in floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall shelves but they were completely full of childhood memories consisting of one large plastic bin per child per year.With three kids all of them at least in middle school, that meant a lot of bins!

Solution: We went through all of the kid’s  memory boxes. At first it was very hard for my client to get rid of childhood papers. She eventually became a champ at making decisions and letting go of enough memories so that each child’s memory items could fit into only one to two bins each. This reduced the storage bins from about 6-8 per child to 2 which gave us a lot more space to store items brought from the off-site storage unit. My client did an amazing job learning how to let go. Her kids still have plenty of great memorabilia to discover and uncover later!

Situation: A two-car garage that held a motorcycle and everything else but the cars! I love this case study because it is very typical of the most common garage challenges. There were fabulous built in cabinets, shelves and overhead storage available but they were difficult to access because of everything piled around and in front of them.

Challenge: The garage had served as a work-out room for awhile and then feel into disuse when the owners moved onto other fitness routines. So what to do with the equipment? There was a treadmill, step machine, free weights with incline bench and a punching bag.

Additionally, there were multiple bicycles and surfboards without a specific place to live.

Solution: We created a work-out room upstairs in a spare bedroom and the free weight and bench which are still useful for the new work-out routine will be moved up to that area. The stepper, treadmill and punching bag were donated to the San Pasqual Foster Academy which really needed the equipment to keep the boys happy. This created a lot more space.

We then took it one step further and hung up all of the grown-up bicycles from the ceiling keeping the daughter’s bicycle, mini-car and wagon accessible on the floor. The motorcycle will be sold in the near future to create even more space.

Once the main floor was cleared, we were able to get inside the storage units. We sorted, boxed and rearranged memories and holiday items and put them in the overhead storage area which opened up space in the easy-to-access cabinets.

With the open space, we were able to bring out entertaining supplies to the garage which helped to create more space in the pantry. We also created holding zones for various sports and activities including camping, triathalon, beach etc.

Another cabinet is now dedicated to household supplies bought in bulk.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of showing FOX 5 news viewers how to organize their garage. We used the actual supplies cabinet in the news Read the rest of this entry »