In late 2016, I was called in to help a client unpack their garage from when they moved into the home… 2 years prior. We spent, collectively, 16 hours going through boxes and sorting craft supplies, pre-purchased gifts, and pantry overflow. If you follow me on Facebook, you may remember my posting of a black widow spider, roughly the size of a baby’s fist (no, really!), to which the homeowners exclaimed, “we either need to burn down the garage or move!”
Fast forward to Spring 2017, I get a call to work in their daughter’s room to ready it for staging to sell, and again to help the family have an organized move. As the family now settles in to their new home, they simply moved the systems I had put in place in the garage (before Charlotte spun her deadly web and put the kibosch on the whole thing), into their new garage! I absolutely love creating flexible systems that can easily move from one place to another.
Their garage pantry area, however, didn’t survive the move because the shelving unit stayed with the old house. My clients really liked what we had set up in the old house and expanded the area in the new one, and again, had me over to do my thang. Organizing a new home is so much fun because you maximize the space before your muscle memory sets in and habits are formed.
Once again, the kids can get their favorite foods for school lunches, and a trip to Costco for 17 cans of evaporated milk or 8 cans of boullion won’t throw their garage into disorganized chaos! We even saved a whole shelf for Costco-sized toilet paper. Pre-planning at it’s best.
During this quick 2-hour session, we also honed and labeled the sporting goods area, making it easy as pie for the kids to put their own gear away in the appropriate places. Labels are incredibly important to the success of kids (and often adults!) putting things back where they found them. Otherwise, they will either leave their things in FRONT of the shelves because they don’t remember what goes where, or they will cram it onto shelves.
It’s also important to not over-stuff the shelves, not only because it looks disorganized even if like items are all together, but also because you want it to be as simple as possible to put something away in it’s home. If you (or the kids) have to struggle, it’s a negative interaction with the task of putting something away, and they will be less inclined to want to do it in the future.