Just Clean the Garage Already!

I’m sure that a lot of men are like me in that they have distinct memories from their childhood of their father and his tools. Perhaps it was a separate garage packed to the brim with all sorts of tools for pretty much anything you could imagine. Or maybe it was watching him change the oil in the family cars, sliding in and out underneath a jacked up vehicle for a few hours on a weekend.

No matter what their memories were, I’m sure they’re similar to mine in the fact that their dad had little to no organization with his tools. (Surely I’m not the only one, right?) Even though I knew that a bit of organization was something that would solve a lot of problems if only he had done a day’s worth of cleaning and rearranging, I’m still the same way my dad was. I don’t have my own garage and all sorts of tools yet, but I can admit that a lot of the stuff in my home is in places that I’d be able to find but no one else would.

The problem is that all this kind of unorganized chaos can become a headache. And when all it takes is proper use of packaging supplies, like a few cardboard boxes, some packing tape to write labels on, and a few hours of your time . . . Well, it’s that easy. That’s about all it takes, yet there are people out there like my dad and me who always find a way to get out of organizing their things.

The funny thing is that it’s not even easier by any means to skip out on organizing things. It actually wastes more time than if you would just tidy up and put things in those cardboard boxes and use your packaging supplies that you know are sitting around other parts of the house.

It actually can cause more stress than just cleaning the garage for one day when you think about it. Like, how much time do you think your dad spends looking around the garage for a single tool? For one particular instance, maybe just a few minutes. But when this happens multiple times a month and accumulates over the course of a year, there would be much more time saved and stress relieved by just getting down to business for an hour or two on a Saturday and cleaning like there’s no tomorrow.