How to organize your tool shed for most effective use
Have you ever gone out to the tool shed to get a tool you needed at the time, only to find yourself spending hours looking for it with no luck? Was your tool shed such as that you decided might as well save yourself the headache and time by going to the store and buy a new tool altogether? Of course that was the fifth tool of the same kind you've bought in the last year just because you can't seem to find anything in your messy tool shed. Well, save yourself some money, and some time, by taking a little bit of time to clean and organize your tool shed. Here are some helpful ways that will put your life your tool shed back into order.
1. What's in that shed?
You need to take everything out of your tool shed and see what you have. A nice, warm day is perfect for this kind of cleaning. You want to make sure that you have lots of room outside to work with. Make a section for Keeps, Donate/Sell and for Trash. Trash section is for anything that can go to the garbage, Keeps are for the tools you want to keep, Donate/Sell is for the tools that you want to sell or donate.
Make sure to keep the tools that go together, together. You should set gardening items with other gardening items, Pool equipment with other pool equipment, etc. Make an area for each category and take the items from the shed and place them in their respective places.
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2. Organize your tool shed
Once you have everything sorted out, make sure to do a quick dusting in your shed. It doesn't' hurt to have a cobweb free tool shed. Now you need to have some shelves for your shed. Make use of your tool shed's height to give you more room for storage. If you don't have time to build shelve, you can buy metal shelves to organize your tool shed. You can find very sturdy and inexpensive metal shelves at home depot or Sam's Club. These shelves are great for storing almost about anything. They can hold a lot of weight too. There are also shelves that you can get that are made of plastic and will stand up to the weather a little better than metal or wood. These choices would also save you a lot of time from building one. Make sure to save food plastics such as ice cream containers and kool aid plastics for your little tools, screws etc. Use a permanent marker to label what each container is for. You should have several different size containers as you will need some smaller containers for some thing and some a little larger for others.
Now you will need to make a place to put the larger tools. These will include items like rakes, hoes, shovels, etc. You can purchase special racks that mount right to the wall that will hold each of these items. You can also use brackets or large nails places just a few inches apart to hang these tools on. If you can not nail to the walls then there are storage helpers out that will help you organize these tools as well.
3. Get the tools ready to go back in the shed.
Now go through your Keeps tools and make sure they are in good condition. Any broken tool should go in the garbage or be fixed before it goes back into the tool shed. Do a brief cleaning on all of your Keep tools so that when you put them back in the tool shed they are all nice and clean.
4. Put everything back into its place in the tool shed.
Now that you have clean and sorted out your tools, they are ready to go back into the tool shed. Hang all of the tools that have handles that can be hung. Place nuts, bolts, screws or anything that may fall to the floor and get lost in one of your kool aid plastic. Place small hand tools on shelves that are higher up and larger hand held tools on lower shelves. This can prevent you from breaking your back when you go to get a heavy tool. Now you are ready to put in items like the lawn mower and wheelbarrow. Place these items along the wall and make sure that you leave room to walk around them.
Now that you have your tool shed organized the thing to do next is keep it that way. You should always put the tools back where you got them after you have finished using them. Clean the tools before you return them. And if you have others that use your tools make sure that they put them back in the proper places as well. If you do this you should be able to keep your shed organized and safe.
