Genius ways to clean up your garage

Maybe you’re finding yourself with a sudden abundance of spare time on your hands. Maybe you’re longing to play that old trombone that you’re sure you packed in there somewhere. Or, maybe, you’re just sick of looking at the mess in your garage each day and you’ve decided now is the time to get things back in order.

Whatever the reason, we’re proud of you. As long as you’re avoiding these garage mistakes that might be putting you in danger.

Check out these ideas to get your garage in order and keep it looking neat.

Maximise your garage storage space quickly and easily with simple and inexpensive shelves, baskets and hooks. These garage storage racks will only take you one morning to achieve garage happiness. By the way, if you mount hooks, brackets, and other hardware only on studs, you’re wasting lots of opportunities for garage wall ideas. The best strategy is to add a layer of 20mm plywood over the drywall or bare studs. That gives you a continuous fastening surface so you can mount storage hardware easily, arrange items in a space-efficient way, and cram more stuff onto the wall.

We got sick and tired of our fishing rods getting tangled, so we came up with this easy fishing rod organisr. All you need is a length of PVC pipe and a foam swimming pool noodle for this DIY garage storage system.

Drill 2cm holes spaced every 10cm in the PVC pipe. Use a utility knife to cut slits in the foam noodle, spacing them 10cm apart. Line up the pool noodle on the wall so that at least two of the slits sit over studs. Pull those slits apart, slide in a fender washer and screw the noodle to the wall with 5cm screws. Then screw the PVC pipe to the wall beneath it at a comfortable height and insert your fishing rods. Look Ma, no more tangles!

Here are more storage solutions using PVC pipe. 

Plastic storage bins are one of the great garage storage systems to separate and organise your equipment by sport or season. Unfortunately, they usually get stacked against a wall somewhere, which makes getting to the bottom bins difficult, especially for your household’s littlest teammates. Luckily, a permanent DIY garage solution is only a weekend away with our easy-to-build storage towers that are an attractive and ingenious way to provide easy access to your bins. Consider different colour bins for each sport to make finding what you need a breeze, and utilise the sides of the wooden frame for wall-mounted accessory items such as fishing rod holders or utility hooks for lightweight equipment.

This storage system solves two challenges: first, how to design storage space for the narrow alley between the garage side wall and your car; and second, how to create a solid mounting surface to hold shelves and hooks that are capable of carrying hundreds of kilos of stuff.

The solution is to create a framework of horizontal wood strips and inexpensive shelf standards. It can hold almost any arrangement of shelving and hooks, at any point on the wall, and it’s easy to rearrange.

Try this wall-to-wall garage storage system. 

Who couldn’t use a few more shelves in the garage? You probably already have shelves in the obvious spots, but what about in the corners? This nifty corner shelf unit takes advantage of existing studs, and it’s fast, easy, and cheap. Use scrap plywood or oriented strand board to make shelves that fit snugly between the corner studs and support them with 1×1 cleats. These corner shelves are perfect for storing smaller items such as glues, oils, waxes, and polishes, which get lost on larger shelves.

Stow bulky items overhead by cementing together a simple rack from 5cm PVC pipes and fittings. Bolt the straight pipe to the ceiling joists to support heavy loads, and screw the angled pieces from the ‘wye’ connectors into the cross brace to stabilise the whole rack. The PVC’s smooth surface makes for easy loading and unloading.

Cardboard concrete-forming tubes are inexpensive and provide a great place to store baseball bats, long-handled tools, and rolls of just about anything. Rest the tubes on a plank of wood to keep them high and dry. Secure each tube to a garage stud with a plumbing strap.

This compact rack is strong and simple to build. You can store shovels, rakes, a sledgehammer—any long-handled tools—conveniently up and out of the way. The unit holds up to 14 items, giving you more flexibility and storage capacity than nails pounded in the wall. See how to build it.

Visit any sporting goods store and you will likely see walls of vertical slats with various hooks and bins that can be rearranged easily based on the display needs. Why not incorporate this easy-to-manage system in your own home with our DIY customisable garage storage? Incorporating many of the same features which make the retail systems so useful, this system is a great weekend project that can grow and change as your needs evolve – and is a cinch to install.