My Messy Garage

I consider myself to be an organized person.  I don't like clutter and while most of my home is organized, I have a dark, ugly secret in my garage.  It looks like something right out of an episode of "Hoarders."  I'm almost too embarrassed to show this to the world, but here it is.

Sigh. I know, it's not pretty.  The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, so here goes.  Hello, my name is Bonnie and I have a messy, disorganized, cluttered garage.  So cluttered in fact, that I can't even park my car in there.  My garage is a black hole where junk gravitates.  It's a graveyard of unfinished projects.

How did it get to this?  Well to be honest, it's not all my stuff.  (Ok, I know that sounds like denial, but it's true!)  A good portion of that stuff is Mr. Pin Junkie's car parts and tools.  Some of that stuff is in fact mine and I've had a bad habit of putting things in the garage and telling myself I'll deal with it later.  It's so easy to throw something in there, close the door and forget about it.  Well, later has arrived and it's time to do something about it.  Especially when I see pictures on Pinterest like these of perfectly organized garages. 

I'm wistfully looking at these pictures and thinking:

Cleaning and organizing the garage is a big project.  I've always heard that to make a big project more manageable, do a little bit at a time to make it less overwhelming and eventually it will get done.  I've tried that approach and I just don't feel like I'm making any progress.  I've taken some things to Goodwill and I've had two yard sales in the last two years and the garage still looks like a hazardous waste site.

It's no fun going into that abyss to sort through stuff.  That garage is dark and it's dirty.  Everything is covered in a layer of dirt, dust, and spiderwebs.  Even though it's no fun, I'm motivated to get the garage cleaned up and de-cluttered because:
- I'm tired of seeing the garage this way and getting nagged reminded by Mr. Pin Junkie to do something about it.
-  We're paying a monthly fee for an extra storage unit so cleaning out the garage would save us money.
 - It will hopefully get Mr. Pin Junkie's car project moving faster toward completion.  If I could get my stuff organized in the garage, then I could nag remind HIM about getting HIS project car finished.

So here are my goals for the garage:
1.  Sort through my stuff in the garage and toss it, donate it, or find a home for it.
2.  Have a yard sale for the remaining stuff.
3.  Get the project car completed.
4.  Repaint the walls of the garage.
5.  Paint or apply some kind of finish to the floor of the garage.
6.  Revel joyously in my garage utopia that's no longer an idea on my Pinterest boards, but a real space in my own house!

I plan on posting monthly updates to show you my progress in the garage. (And I'm determined to make some progress!)

So what does your garage look like?  Is it cluttered or organized?  Do you have a different room in your home that needs some serious organizing?  Do you currently have a big unpleasant project that you're putting off?  I'd love to hear about it.