During our recent remodel we used the garage to store all kind of things that usually had homes in the kitchen. In fact we had the kitchen in the garage for six months. It was not fun. But the remodel turned out very well and we are very happy with our new soft modern look in the new family room and kitchen. But this article is about reclaiming the garage. Every available space had been stacked with things that were homeless.

Debris and detritus in the garage/workshop

The east bench before

Our garage has never been for cars. It has for most of the twenty plus years we’ve lived in the house been part storage and part workshop. This tidying/cleaning process is intended to recover some of the space shown in the pictures above for the workshop.
I have three different tidying, organizing, cleaning techniques that I use. Which method I use is situation dependent. When the mess is this bad I use the rule of tens. In the area that needs tidying I pick up the ten most egregiously out of place things and put them away or throw them away. For things that have to be put away somewhere else I stack them out of the area to be taken care of later. I count the items in my head and when I reach ten I look at the progress and time permitting start over.
The rule of tens works for big messes because it allows maximum progress with minimum effort and it has pre-set stopping points. At the end of putting away ten things you can always see real progress and then establish a new baseline to work from.
This is what the workshop area of the garage looked like at the end of two hours:

The new workbench after

the east bench after
Progress is being made. Next step the storage area of the garage.