Garage Organization: Shelves

One of my big projects for this year, I decided, is to reorganize my garage.  Since it's such a big undertaking, I'm taking baby steps.  Baby steps.  Here is my plan of attack:
1)  Take everything off the storage shelves above the washer/dryer and move the shelves back to their original place.
2)  Clean up the doors and insides of the cabinets.
3)  Reorganize inside the cabinets by category (use plastic bins/tupperware/ziplock baggies).
4)  Buy hooks to hang some items up on the walls.
5)  Re-do the laundry area to make it nicer??

Last night, I took care of #1.  I got a wild hair at 9:30pm to get this done.  I'm a night person, what can I say.

First off, here's a couple of pictures of where the shelves used to be.

Yeah, that's my nephew.  He was helping me out that day.  The nice thing is that the holes are still in the wall from where they originally were, so I wouldn't have to do any measuring.    I wanted to move them back to the other wall so it would be much easier for me to access items on the shelves.

Here is where the shelves are now.

They're right above my washer & dryer.  Actually, it's quite the perfect spot for them because both of the shelves take up the entire wall span exactly - from one end of the wall to the air conditioning/heating unit on the other end.  A couple of weekends ago, I took everything off the shelves.

I actually decided last week that I'm going to keep them up there.  They just fit so perfectly in that space.  The items that were going to be kept on the shelves are seasonal items and I wouldn't really need to get to them except for a few times a year.  Also, it frees up that entire wall for me to utilize for other things (see the bookshelf in the lower bottom corner of the picture above?  That may get moved to the empty wall to use for storing extra supplies).  So, this made my job much, much easier. 

So, I finally dusted them off (the shelves and the boxes & bins) and got to work. When I took everything off the shelves a couple of weeks ago, I just put them on the floor under my work bench.

And all this other stuff had been sitting out on the work bench or the middle of the garage since the Fall when I got all of the Halloween & Christmas decorations down from the rafters.  Yeah, I was actually embarrassed for my neighbors to see everything sitting around all junky whenever I would open the garage door.  I know, who really cares, right?

So, I got everything off of the floor and workbench and up onto those shelves.

Much better!  As you can see in the pictures above, the garage door track is in front of the left side and the air conditioning/heating unit duct is in front of the right side.  Because of these, it makes it harder to access those parts.  So, I decided to put the less used items in those spots.  I ended up putting all of the camping gear on the left and the holiday decor on the right.

I also decided to put labels on some of the bins to make it easier to find stuff.   I used the label templates from the Better Homes & Gardens website that I used in my craft room and ran them through the Xyron machine and just stuck them on the fronts of the bins.  Easy peezy!

Here are some Before & Afters...

BEFORE

There was actually more stuff up there, but some of that stuff is long gone now.

IN PROGRESS

 

 AFTER

Woo hoo!  I feel so much better now that the workbench is (mostly) cleared off and everything is on the shelves and out of my way.
Hopefully I'll get to step 2 soon.  That one shouldn't take me very long.  (Step 3 will though - not really looking forward to that).