Use Your Home Garage for Its Intended Purpose

Tips to Clean, Organize, and Equip, Even on a Budget

Is your home garage so cluttered it is difficult to so much as fit your car, truck, or SUV inside? Has your garage become barely a storage place for your vehicle, and with it, not a fit place to actually work on your car? If so, you need help - the sooner the better. The following tips can help.

While it's attractive - at least, temporarily - to treat your garage like free storage, your garage is actually best suited to storing your car or cars as well as serving as an area in which to service these vehicles. It should also be a place where you can store the tools and materials needed to perform home-based maintenance on your fleet - whether it's one car or three.

With this in mind, follow these steps and tips to better use of your garage space:

First, look closely at your garage space. What can be eliminated through junk pickup, sold at a garage or yard sale, or stored in a more appropriate place to provide you room to both park your vehicles and do maintenance upon them. Some items, like bicycles and such, can be mounted from the ceiling to give you space to work and part. Other material may simply not belong in a garage so start your cleanout now.

Second, do you have adequate work tables and shelves upon which to store materials like spare oil and parts, tools, and the like? If not, some plywood and a few parts let you build work tables. Also, you can purchase such work shelves used at other people's garage sales or buy new shelving (assembled or ready-to-assemble) at any general merchandise or home improvement store for prices ranging from the inexpensive to the fairly sophisticated and long lasting.

Once you have shelving and work space, you can put old cans, jars, and other recycled items to use to hold short-term fluids, parts, screws, fuses, and more. Just remember to mark them carefully. Consider too adding a bag of quality car cloths, some automotive cleaner for your hands and tools, and other needed components. I like to pick up lots of these items at liquidation sales and yard/garage sales where I can save a bundle. You may want to consider this as well.