Organize The Garage, step by step

Ok, so perhaps our messy garage was not disastrous sufficient for you people, but we did discover several new species of spiders in there… and Sherry was “attacked” by a mouse in the cleaning process (it ran over her feet- yes, both of them- but her shrieking made it seem much more vicious). No matter the scale of our mess, it was quite satisfying to spend an hour on Saturday morning simply purging, sweeping and rearranging for a totally cleared out and organized end product. In case you were wondering what the process looked like, here is a lively little time lapse video that we made of our big garage clean-up (you can watch it below or over here on YouTube):

As for how we shot the time lapse, it was simply a plain set-up using our newly refurbished MacBook’s built-in iSight camera and a downloadable program called Gawker. Then, thanks to the slope of our driveway, we simply put the computer on a box (of which we had plenty) and hit record. The whole thing looked like this:

But back to tackling the garage. It was fairly much simply a plain cleaning effort this time around. We share your dreams of someday implementing a few stellar organization systems (nothing excites us like a wall of built in cabinetry and a tool-riddled peg board) but we realized during last year’s clean-up that we simply do not have sufficient stuff to warrant anything major yet. Perhaps once we have kids and have accumulated all sorts of frisbees, basketballs, and camping gear we will find ourselves excitedly installing an intricate shelving or cabinetry system. But for now we were simply be glad to rid our bike seats of cobwebs and put an end to the cardboard box convention that took place where our car could have otherwise been living.

As you may have noticed on the video, we used the tried & true process of moving everything out and creating three groups: 1) trash, 2) recycle/donate and 3) keep. Then once the garage was empty we broke out the brooms to sweep out all the leaves and remove all the remaining cobwebs. Afterwards the “keep” stuff got moved back in (with a more orderly & intentional arrangement this time – garden tools with garden tools, paint with paint, etc). Storing like objects together consistently makes it easier to find things and creates zones like “paints & stains” (which are housed on the tall tiered shelf) and “rakes & shovels” (which now hang together in a row on wall hooks).

Hopefully we will keep the garage looking this way for a while, but then again, we likely said that last year so only time will tell. It seems that our weakness lies in the fact that we are not consistently ideal about cleaning up the remnants of past projects. In fact, the clean-up process was a bit of a walk down memory lane. Simply check out some of the “artifacts” that we rediscovered on Saturday morning:

1. Two catering buckets that The Nest’s photo crew ordered (now used for carwashing)
2. A cast iron sink from our old kitchen, which we at last Freecycled yesterday
3. Painted pots from an R Home photoshoot, one of which I clumsily kicked over
4. Boxes from our recent mattress delivery…
5. … nesting in a box from our new patio lounge chairs
6. An old metal firepit that got rusty and was replaced by our new Hands-on stone firepit
7. Sticky scraps of balloon from our failed string lantern project for the front porch

But sufficient about our clean-up, we are eager to hear more about YOUR weekend projects. We have already received a few strong before and (much tidier) afters by email, so we’d enjoy if everyone could share links to their pics in the comment section of this post so that we can all marvel at the weekend projects that were accomplished (photos can be uploaded to photo sharing sites like flickr, kodak and shuttefly and linked to for all to see). Thanks again for tackling this project with us! We will have to do it again sometime…

Time lapse video music courtesy of MoOt.