The Dreaded Garage!

I like to think I maintain a organized home, a place for everything and everything in its place. But I have a confession...... our garage was anything but organized. It was a free for all, dump whatever gigantic mess. We moved into this home two days before Christmas and it was CRAZY! I was so concerned about getting the house put together to have a nice Christmas for my family that the garage was left a totally out of control monstrosity until this weekend. We needed a well organized space but without spending a fortune to get there.

We already had two of these
a ton of these,
and one of these, but we needed more organization so we headed to Costco where we picked up a couple of these. Our garage is where we keep a lot of our storage things, we don't have a basement nor have an abundance of closet space in our home, we have one storage closet in the whole house, which acts as a large pantry (food storage room) so our garage is the place where we store most of everything and everything turns into a mess unless it is under control.

Now brace yourself...or look away because here comes the mess...UGH..deep breath from me. :)

I am so embarrassed.

The plan of action:
Separate into 5 categories.

1. Things to keep
2. Things to throw away
3. Things to donate/sell
4. Things to fix
5. Things that go someplace else
other than the garage.

Once that was done we needed to organize items into categories.

Tools
72 hour kits: in case of an emergency we have these handy kits that I put together for each family member. You can read more about 72 hour kits here.
Snow trip stuff
Sports equipment
Beach gear
Easter
Halloween
Camping/Fishing
Paint Supplies

And create a work bench area for me.

We boxed things up that needed a box, donated a pile of stuff, swept, and took control of all the clutter. It's not perfect by any means, it still needs some work. But after 4 hours it looked like this....

Just disregard the cute little in the pictures..she wanted to pose in all of my pictures. :)

We still need to go through boxes of stuff towards the back of the garage, and we still need to take a trip to the dump. (all the trash is piled up on top of the treadmill (that needs to go upstairs in our bedroom) that you can't see near my new workbench (squeal) and the shelving unit you see next to it is going to be hung up above my workbench area. We would also like to get a couple of these. Do you have any garage organization advice? Where do you store all of your stuff?