Our garden shed is our favourite add-on room.
When organized properly, by season, it’s a wonderful place with tools, seasonal items and lots of light. Some may even say it’s peaceful and inspirational. When organized poorly, it’s most likely a place bats live, and we literally throw our recycling in there throughout the week, dreading the eve before garbage day when we have to break down all those Amazon boxes for recycling.
Your garden shed (and any other type of shed) can easily be spruced up to become your seasonal oasis. We've shared helpful tips for organizing your shed below.
5 Tips to Maximize Your Shed
- Does This Bring Me (Seasonal) Joy? We’re kidding. But you do need to go through everything in your shed, preferably when the weather is nice, and you can put everything outside of your shed. You should only keep seasonally appropriate things. Here are some examples - You don’t need a rake in the middle of winter, but you do need a shovel in the middle of winter. You don’t need a child’s sled in the middle of summer. You need a super soaker! Be ruthless with this step and move everything that is “out of season” to your self-storage unit.
- Pegboards Are Hip: Pegboards remind us of the 70s, but they were useful then and they’re useful now. We recommend painting yours a light colour (not necessarily white because it will get dirty). You can hang your tools, and especially your sharper tools (out of reach from the kids) and gain space on the floor. This will help keep your shed organized, so you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for fast and easy. If you want bonus points, you can trace the outline of your tool with a permanent marker, so you know what should be where…yes, some people are that organized!
- Shelves: Shelves are amazing because they instantly help you gain vertical space and make more room more for organization. We suggest putting up shelves to use the full height of your shed. Make sure they are sturdy and deep so you can store larger items. We prefer metal shelving that drains so that any wet items dry and don’t rot.
- Repurpose Containers: Keep food jars that you were going to recycle, wash them (and remove any labels) and use them for nails, small tools, etc. If you finished painting a room and used up all the paint, use the empty dry pail for larger items. Make sure to label everything clearly so that you can easily find what you are looking for.
- Hang From The Ceiling: We have hooks all over our ceiling and they are great for hanging bikes, a leaf blower, hula hoops…the list is endless. A lot of sheds have rafters, which helps use the vertical height more efficiently.
Your shed can be a useful space, or it can be one that you avoid. If you get into the habit of properly putting things away, and are minimalist on what you keep in your shed seasonally, you will use your stuff more and things won’t get lost or broken. An added bonus - your spouse will likely stop nagging you to clean up the shed and be impressed with your awesome organization!
At Storage Solutions, we help our customers with their seasonal storage needs all the time. We have many sizes of units, which means if you have a lot of winter stuff, you can go up to a bigger unit, but if you don’t have a lot of summer stuff, you can go down a unit size. We also offer long access hours, which gives you greater flexibility to never be without your stuff.
Have questions about self storage? We’d love to hear from you! Call, Text or email us for 100% touch-free service. You can also virtually tour either of our Milton self storage or Woodstock self storage facilities and different sized storage units via YouTube. We make renting self-storage easy!
Good luck organizing your shed, and if you have any tips to share, let us know!
Your friend in self-storage,
Storage Solutions
