What is it about spring that drives us to organize the garage?
“It can get pretty messy with roller skates in the middle of the floor, shovels not put away,” explained Melinda Smith, who recently decluttered her garage with her sons, Matthew and Taylor, while their father was out golfing. “It can get to be a pretty big pile.”
So we flock to home-improvement stores where wall hooks, storage bins and toolboxes draw plenty of takers.
“As fast as we can put it in, it goes out,” sales associate Bob Streahle said of the inventory at the Cherry Hill, N.J., Home Depot store. “People come in and they’ll grab two of this and four of that. Others will stand back, not sure of what they need.”
One reason is that there are many more options for garage organization than there were 5 or 10 years ago.
“There’s a broader range of products to choose from, they have more features, and the big retailers have hammered prices down,” said Greg Alford, senior partner with Peachtree Consulting Group in Atlanta, who cites heavy-duty wire shelving and toolboxes with lid-top storage as relatively recent boons.
In catalogs and specialty stores and on Web sites, the selection continues, with everything from gardening caddies and new approaches to whole-wall organizing, to sports-equipment racks and baskets by the score.
So with all of these choices, why does creating a functional garage out of a winter’s neglect sometimes intimidate folks?
People “are overwhelmed and don’t know where to start,” said Mary McGowan, who organizes garages for a living as part of her Philadelphia-area business, Organizational Concepts.
She’s come across containers of oil where homeowners change their own, items from infancy where the youngest child in the family is 10 years old, and cardboard boxes piled higher than a car.
“They can’t tell you what’s in many areas of their garage,” she said of some clients.
And to pay $40 an hour and up for McGowan to inform them–not including cleaning and whatever is necessary to organize the winnowed pile–can cost.
According to Alford, garage organization is among the top three home-improvement priorities. But “it’s probably one of the last things that gets done in people’s homes,” said Kevin Shaha, president of Racor, which makes sports and other storage equipment.
“It’s like the attic–they throw stuff in there and don’t look at it.”
Only when they realize, “I’ve got this big garage and don’t even park the car in it,” do they take action.
We’ve gone from a nation of one-car to two-and-more-car garages, said Sue Buchta, a product manager at Rubbermaid.
“With more space, all the tools, toys and lawn and garden equipment that once had to go in the basement or outside under a tarp” often go there.
“I think when you look at the demographics of someone who has an SUV or a minivan or at least a two-car garage, organization is really important.”
It will help you get those two cars in the garage, she said, and ease the stress of not being able to find what you need.
Cliff DeCoursey knows the feeling. “If things are scattered, it bothers me,” he observed recently from his Cherry Hill garage. “If I can’t find something, I go nuts.”
About two months ago, he decided to do something about the clutter in the family’s “one-car” garage. A lot of it was at the rear, and “there was a chance you might bump into something” putting in the car.
So he cut some spare lumber to make wall anchors, bought some hooks, and mounted his ladders and six of the seven family bikes.
Then, he put the children’s hockey sticks, baseball bats and balls in an old plastic trash can and mounted a simple tool holder on a wall to hang rakes and shovels.
Some old metal shelving along another wall continues to hold everything from lawn-care products to kindling.
The garage looks notably navigable.
“People look around in awe,” said DeCoursey’s wife, Trisha.
At the Kennett household in West Chester, “the garage hasn’t seen a car in the last 12 or 13 years,” said Bruce Kennett. But there are wide pathways cleared in both stalls.
“We have to put the trash out,” quipped Kennett, a wrestling coach.
The garage, packed with sporting equipment of every stripe, reflects years of shared good times for the family, including Bruce’s wife, Sheila, a physical education teacher, and their four active sons, ages 14 to 20.
Several bikes are suspended upside down from the rafters, while vintage sleds also hang, and ladders are wall-mounted. Nearly a score of fishing rods are in varying states of attachment to pegboard.
But on the floor, a leaf blower, an extra stove, a screen door in need of repair and a large pile of bricks destined to become a wall share space with a dozen of the boys’ early trophies, an old computer, several surfboards, other bikes, golf-club sets, in-line skates, street hockey sticks, goalie pads, and a go-cart.
“We do live life,” said Bruce.
Organizing the garage “has not been a priority,” said his wife. “Bruce is painting the hallway and finishing the basement.”
Imposing order on a garage involves a few steps: Pulling out its contents, sorting them, and purging what you don’t use–then putting back the rest so it’s retrievable.
That’s what Melinda Smith and her 11-year-old twins recently did, making the lawn and driveway look temporarily “like a garage sale no one was invited to.”
But some people get emotionally attached to things or are unsure if they want to part with them.
Clients ask McGowan, ” `Should I keep this?’ I’ll ask them, `When was the last time you used the item?’
“I never tell anyone to get rid of anything.”
Once the garage’s contents are pared, containers and organizing tools “can make it easier to keep the results,” said Langhorne organizer Linda Manzo.
So what’s out there to do the job?
One easy-to-assemble option for getting stuff off the floor is snap-together cabinets. Rubbermaid touts the extra protection afforded by its blow-molded construction–an air pocket between two layers of plastic–for stored items such as paint, while a nice feature of Keter Plastic’s WorkForce units is the pegboard-type back to their doors.
If you want attached shelving, a heavy-duty wire option is ClosetMaid’s Maximum Load ShelfTrack, made of vinyl-coated steel and able to support up to 600 pounds per 6-foot shelf. Another strong wire product comes from the Container Store, the Dallas-based chain and catalog devoted to storage solutions, where Swedish elfa shelving now comes in 20-inch shelf depths.
Sports-equipment organizers are another category to consider. Choices in such items at the Container Store have quadrupled over the last seven years, says buyer Jill Nance.
Golf organizers and in-line skate racks are their top sellers. A new addition: Racor’s All-Board Rack, which stows skateboards, snowboards and wakeboards.
“Sports has been a big area for growth,” says Nance, “but we’re also getting nicer items for holding handled tools and tool racks,” she added, referring to the wall-mounted Magic Holder, which has a ball mechanism that moves out to secure handles in place.
At Racor, a 6-month-old product line that secures racks, baskets and hooks holding a wide variety of gear is also drawing favorable response. The InterChange Modular Storage System, which Alford terms “a nice innovation,” is being test-marketed by Home Depot.
The system, which offers the option of shifting items around on the wall as your needs change seasonally, “grew out of the limitations of pegboard, which can’t hold much weight and deteriorates over time,” said.
The same desire to be flexible and use every inch of available wall space influenced Schulte to come up with a very different solution–its wire grid-based Activity Organizers system, carried by specialty stores and closet dealers.
“Imagine all the items you need to store, and you need to move something to the left or to the right six inches,” said Gil Foltz, vice president of sales and marketing. If you used a lot of individual hooks, “you had to put them firmly in the wall and hope they were spaced just right the first time.
“Once you do your grid, you’re done putting holes in the wall.”
Schulte’s individual hooks, racks and baskets lock into the grid, although they can also go directly into the wall. Properly installed, the grid will hold up to 600 pounds.
With so many options, do any of them appeal to Kennett?
“From time to time we’ve tried to do various hooks,” he explained, and whatever’s still hanging on them “is probably not being used.”
“The reality is the kids take stuff down,” he said, and they don’t put it back.
