These 5 Garage Lifehacks Will Leave You With A Lot More Space

Having your own garage can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, garages can usually double as storage sheds, giving you a convenient place to store all of your outdoor work stuff without worrying about bringing dirty stuff into your home, not to mention the whole "having a place to put your car" thing.

However, with the freedom of a garage comes its own headaches. When you have a designated spot to put all the dirty metal stuff that you own, sooner or later, things are going to start getting messy and disorganized. Tools get strewn all over the floor or end up in messy, potentially hazardous piles, and you can't seem to find anything when you actually need it. But what are you supposed to do with a big wooden or concrete room with no built-in shelving? Well, you've got all those tools handy, so why not use them to optimize the space a bit?

The walls of your garage can do more than repel the elements and smell funny after a few years. There's so much unused real estate on those walls, so why not put it to work for you and get all of your tools off the ground?

All it takes is a power drill and a peg board, and you can create a sturdy source of wall-mounted storage that can run your garage's entire internal surface area. Once you've got the wall set up, then all you need are some hooks, platforms, and magnetic strips. Hooks can be used to hang tools, platforms can be used for shelves or to hold larger objects like recycling bins, and magnetic strips can hold metal tools and objects.

Can't find the right hooks for the job? There are also lots of options for wall-mounted organizers for sale out there. With a single hook and a sheet of pouches, for instance, you can get the perfect one-stop source for your gardening tools.

If you own a toolbox and use it a lot, odds are good that sooner or later, you'll end up with a bunch of miscellaneous screws, nails, washers, and other assorted bits and bops clogging up the bottom of it. There's no way you'll be able to find the components you need like that, plus piling them all together makes them more susceptible to corrosion.

Instead, make use of standalone storage to clearly organize all of your components. For this purpose, mason jars are your ideal option. You can store all of your screws in one jar, all of your nails in another, and so on. Mason jars are sturdy and resistant, and since they're clear, you can always see what you've got stored in one. If you don't have mason jars, ziplock plastic baggies will also work, though they might not last as long.

The corners of a garage can often go unused, aside from perhaps the occasional pile of miscellaneous nonsense and the cobwebs that inevitably follow. If you're trying to optimize your garage, though, that means effectively utilizing every single square inch of potential storage space, corners included. What's the best way to make use of those tight nooks, though? Simple: use a shelf!

A basic, multi-tier shelving unit can be pushed vertically into a tight corner, giving you multiple tiers of additional storage, making whatever's in the corner much easier to reach, and keeping it all off the floor where the creepy crawlies can't get at it. You don't need anything fancy here — a standalone metal shelving unit can be purchased from most hardware stores for less than a hundred bucks and assembled in an afternoon. Just make sure to measure the corner before you buy a shelf so you don't accidentally get something too big.

No matter how many shelves you install and containers you put stuff in, it won't be very helpful if you still don't know where anything is. Unless you're exclusively using transparent containers and can identify their contents at a mere glance, you need a better way to keep track of what goes where. Luckily, there is an exceedingly simple solution here, and all it takes is some duct tape and a Sharpie.

Placing labels around your garage not only helps you identify what's in your sealed containers, but it also helps you to set up designated spaces for everything. For instance, you can place a label on a particular spot on a shelf for your gardening shears, then place the shears back in that specific spot whenever you're done with them. No more will you have to go digging around in piles to find an obscure tool — now it's right where it's meant to be.

If you have kids, then they may not always be the most respectful of your garage's organization system. Stuff might get knocked off of shelves, toys get strewn everywhere, tricycles get parked right behind your car and get run over when you leave for work, and so on. You can try to teach your kids about whatever systems you're currently using, but rather than that, it may be better to just give them a system of their own.

Designate a spot in your garage that's strictly for your kids' usage, marking it off with brightly-colored masking tape to give it a little fun flair. You can add a small shelf or sturdy bin for outdoor toys, as well as a spot for trikes, bikes, and pedal cars. Everything within this marked-off area is your kids' responsibility, which means not only do all the scattered toys stay out of your hair, but with any luck, your kids will learn a lesson about organizing for themselves.