A clean garage: How to tackle a monster mess!

Welcome to our LochMess monster that was our garage until last Saturday! Feast your eyes one these beautiful pictures.

And a slightly different angles, because just one picture of LochMess is not enough.

You might remember that I mentioned in my goals for this year, back in January, that we needed to tackle our garage mess.

I even showed you this picture of my paint section.

And even mused about how I would probably be tackling this in March, no later than April! Ha ha... Welcome to June!

I tried starting the clutter clearing several times, not gaining any traction. Moving one piece over here, shuffling some things over there...

Then last Saturday, I decided to pull out the big guns. We opened the garage door and I made some cardboard signs for each group of items such as: Paint, cleaning, hazardous, donate, electrical, projects.

Then we went to work emptying the garage and sorting into piles. My paint section was overflowing.

I found this to be a really effective method over my previous shuffling method and it was even borderline "fun" to see all the progress. Fun in the sense that I got excited that I would soon be able to run through my garage again. Maybe even park a car in there? Ohhhhh la la!

Ongoing project and empty bins section pile.

Meanwhile, the garage starting slowly looking a bit better.

This at the midway point, about 3 hours in.

And almost empty.

Paint section shelves all empty and wiped!

And here everything is put back in in an orderly fashion. There is a little section on the bottom right with tiling supplies, almost everything else is painting supplies and paint.

I even organized my box of sandpaper and sanding tools.

The cleanup yielded a little pile for hazardous waste - batteries, cfls (sparepærer) and old paints. On the right hand side a donation pile.

This morning I quickly put together a shelf for my ongoing projects.

And that concluded our cleaning of the garage.

We have some big plans for the work table you see there in the middle. More on that another time.

Before the last "after" picture, let's look at what she used to look like one more time.

Such a big difference. Let the cartwheeling commence!

Dh and I spent around 6-7 hours on Saturday, then I went to Salvation Army with the donate pile on Sunday and on Tuesday B and I went to "Hazardous" by the landfill, where hazardous waste is free to get rid of. Then I spent about half an hour this morning on my project shelf. Time very well spent, I think!

Bye, bye LochMess! Don't let the garage door hit you you know where...

Do you have any really big messes in your house, that are so big you would rather just close the door to it, like I did for the past mumble, mumble year at least mumble mumle?